Dive Brief:

• Amazon sold more than one million smart home devices on July 17, the second day of its 36-hour Prime Day event, making it the biggest sales day for smart home devices in the e-commerce giant's history, according to an Amazon press release.

• Ring, the smart doorbell maker acquired by Amazon earlier this year, sold out of its Ring Video Doorbell Pro on July 16, the first day of the sales event, leading Ring to have its biggest sales day ever on Amazon, the press release stated.

• Amazon also said Prime Day 2018 was the biggest event ever for sales of Echo devices with screens — the Echo Show and Echo Spot. Additionally, the Prime Day deal featuring the Amazon Cloud Cam was the best-selling security camera deal in Amazon history, the company stated.

Dive Insight:

Like many big retailers, Amazon has been pushing aggressively into the smart home market. In recent months, Amazon has furthered the integration of its Alexa virtual assistant into smart home environments, expanded the availability of its Amazon Key service and offered home security service packages as well. While Amazon is just one of many retailers looking to unlock more revenue from smart homes, few of those retailers have a sales event to showcase their products that makes quite the impact that Prime Day does.

According to Amazon, Prime Day's best-selling products were the Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote and the Echo Dot. Indeed, a report by Edison Trends emailed to Retail Dive cited that sales of Echo devices jumped to 45 times the average number sold per day over the last month. Echo devices soared from their usual 0.1% of all items sold on Amazon to 1.7%, Edison said. 

For its part, Amazon described the day-and-a-half sale as "the biggest event ever for Amazon devices" — and that was no accident.

Just as few other retailers have invented a sale with the impact of Prime Day, few of them can afford to cut prices as sharply as Amazon does during Prime Day — a tactic which may help Amazon more than any of its marketplace sellers, as the company looks to boost the sales volume of its device ecosystem.

Slashing prices on Amazon devices like the Fire TV Stick, Echo family and tablets like the Fire HD 10, and giving Prime members access to those deals 12 hours before the rest of the Prime Day kicked in, no doubt will result in those devices ending up in more consumer homes, which will likely lead to more Amazon purchases in the future — or so goes the logic.

Amazon is neither the oldest nor the biggest name in technology devices for computing, video streaming, TV and smart home, and other retailers have longer legacies of selling such devices, but the growth of Prime has changed the game. Delivering Prime members a can't-miss sales event only helps Amazon's device families thrive against what otherwise may be more equal odds.