Why Amazon's Black Friday could disrupt the retail holiday

Dive Brief:

Amazon is launching its seasonal deals Friday—this Friday, Nov. 20, that is, a week before Black Friday. The deals will go on for eight days, and ten bigger deals (on more coveted items) will be unveiled midnight on Thanksgiving, with another 10 going live on Black Friday.
Among the Lightning Deals are 150 items from electronics to kitchen gadgets that will only be available through the retailer’s mobile app. These “App Only Deals” will be released between 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. Pacific Time beginning on Thanksgiving and last through Dec. 9.
To help customers keep track of deals (and once more strengthen the tie to mobile) the e-retail giant has introduced a “Watch a Deal” feature, with push notifications that customers receive when a deal is on. Prime members in areas with two-hour delivery will get free delivery on some Deals of the Day.

Dive Insight:

When Jeff Bezos sauntered on stage to unveil the company’s Fire phone last year, we wondered why the retailer had put so much effort into a high-priced device when a well-designed app would do. The phone’s fundamental flaw was that it was ultimately designed to delight Amazon itself, and not so much its users.

Now, with the Fire phone over and done with, the company seems to finally be looking to its app to capture shoppers’ attention—and perhaps change the Black Friday holiday completely. With its supped up fulfillment centers, the retailer seems to be ready to match the influx of orders the holidays produce, and deliver them with highly competitive speed. This could spell trouble for brick-and-mortar retailers that depend on holiday shopping foot traffic and the overall allure of Black Friday, which seems to be waning, to drive up sales.

“I expect to see Black Friday probably be not as much of an event [in brick-and-mortar stores] as it used to be,” eMarketer retail analyst Yoram Wurmser told Wired. “People are going more for experiences rather than products. I think that’s having an effect on some of these traditional retailers as well.”

Depending on shoppers’ reaction to Amazon’s holiday spread, Amazon could make it even more difficult for retailers that don’t have their own mobile apps or websites ready for prime time to compete. Last year, holiday sales from Amazon’s shopping app doubled.

“Customers can truly sit back and relax with their family and friends this holiday season knowing that they will be notified as soon as the products they’ve had their eye on are about to go on sale,” Steve Shure, Amazon VP of consumer marketing, said in a statement. “Year after year, more and more customers shop for deals on Amazon from the comfort of their own home, and we continue to make that process even more convenient for them. And with ‘App Only Deals,’ customers will have plenty of options when it comes to scoring great deals from Amazon.”

According to some analysts, this convenience to skip the store lines and shop Black Friday from the comfort of a couch or favorite lounge chair may change the holiday in a pivotal way.

“If consumers think that they’re getting some good deals, and some special deals even several days before Thanksgiving, I think Amazon could change some of their shopping habits in a way that very few other retailers could do,” Wurmser told Wired. “I think they’re really trying to change the landscape with things like Prime Day and these eight days of Black Friday.”

This year, as with any Black Friday deals, savvy shoppers will decide how good the deals are, or if the items they really want are the ones with the attractive prices. Amazon’s Prime Day this summer left some customers grumbling about sold-out items, sale items that weren’t very exciting, and prices that weren’t that low. Then again, that day saw "hundreds of thousands" of new Prime members sign up, and Amazon said that customers ordered nearly 400 items per second. Worldwide, orders rose 266% year over year, and were 18% over Black Friday.