Dive Brief:
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Amazon’s Prime Day may have generated mixed reviews, but it also generated a lot of sales, the company said Thursday.
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The midsummer shopping event was billed as a celebration of Amazon’s 20th anniversary, but the retailer said it plans to make it a regular thing.
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Global orders bested Black Friday sales by 18% and Prime members ordered some 34.4 million products — tallied at 398 products ordered each second.
Dive Insight:
It’s no surprise that Amazon’s bringing back Prime Day — it turned out to be the blockbuster Amazon said it would be. That’s in contrast to the noisy social media complaints and put-downs of the sale, which was available to Prime members only, including those who signed up Wednesday for a free trial.
Some shoppers may have been hoping for more Black Friday-style deals on top items like big-ticket electronics rather than the glut of everyday household items that streamed on the site all day. Those electronics were on sale, but often through tick-tocking limited times, and many sold out rapidly.
But those everyday items were also really good deals, if on a different scale. And they were surely a primer for new Prime members trying the membership out for the first time, a lesson on how the retailer is a good source for general consumer products, with free delivery and subscription options.
Indeed, in many ways the day was a major advertisement for Prime membership, and in that was probably also a huge success, much beyond the sales numbers.
“I see a lot of reports have come out saying that people haven’t got the deals they expected,” Shmuli Goldberg, marketing director at pricing platform FeedVisor, told Retail Dive. “But look at the amount of deals on Prime Day, in every single category. Add in the movies, the music, the additional Prime membership perks — Prime Day was the perfect ambassador for that.”