Dive Brief:
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The day after Prime Day, a one-day sale Amazon promised would rival Black Friday, the Internet was strewn with snarky Tweets about the event, and, worse for Amazon, plenty of disappointed customers.
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Still, third-party sellers on Amazon saw sales increase 80% in the U.S. and 40% in Europe year-over-year, according to ChannelAdvisor. It was a “decent” sales day, according to Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, but nothing that approached Cyber Monday or Alibaba’s blockbuster Singles Day in November.
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Meanwhile, the number of Amazon’s Prime members last quarter grew by 3 million people to a total of 44 million. That’s nearly half (47%) of Amazon’s U.S. customers.
Dive Insight:
There was a lot of anticipation around Amazon’s Prime Day, to the point where some amount of let-down was probably inevitable.
While there was general consensus among experts that the event was a way for Amazon to boost its number of Prime members, it’s hard to know yet how well that worked. In some ways, the event underscored the value of brick-and-mortar stores: the sale was somewhat difficult to navigate, and appeared to be cluttered with a lot of everyday items like toilet cleaner and baby wipes.
More exciting big-ticket items sold out so quickly that the experience was missed by many - a huge source of disappointment.
But many people did find what they wanted, at considerable discounts. Cameras, goPros, television sets, and Kindles were flying at shocking prices.
And some customers took the quirkiness of the day and its offerings in stride, with more than one person pointing out that Black Friday can be similarly disappointing, with the added danger of potentially being physically harmful.
If Amazon is going to go there again, however, it will have to make major changes, including making the sale easier to navigate, extending the availability of some prices, and maybe lowering the profile of those hum-drum everyday items. Nobody heads to a better-than-Black-Friday sale event excited about doing really well on Tupperware.
