Brief:

• Amazon Prime Day, a day-long sale that was estimated to generate about $1 billion in sales for the e-commerce giant, triggered greater activity among other mobile retailers throughout the entire week — except on Prime Day itself, according to a Liftoff study made available to Mobile Marketer.
• Smartphone users who installed any shopping app during "Prime Week" were 47% more likely to make a purchase than during the previous six weeks. The three days leading up to the July 11 Prime Day showed higher rates of installs and purchases in non-Amazon shopping apps than in the prior six weeks, Liftoff found.
• On Prime Day itself, non-Amazon shopping apps saw a 13% drop in purchases and a 1.6% drop in installs as consumers shifted their focus to Amazon. On the day after the sale ended, however, shoppers returned to other apps for purchases, where conversion rates surged to a peak of 71% on the Thursday after Prime Day.

Insight:

Amazon's summer version of Black Friday gets people in the mood to shop with mobile apps, which urged competitors to roll out their own promotions that piggyback on the massive publicity Amazon generates each year. Liftoff's research — which analyzed more than four million mobile ad impressions, 844,069 app installs and 17,313 purchases within non-Amazon mobile shopping apps — suggests that mobile users who installed a commerce app around Prime Day did so with a high intent to make at least one purchase.

For next year's shopping holiday in July, Amazon's competitors might want to avoid spending their marketing dollars on Prime Day, instead opting to ramp up efforts on other days in during the week to drive sales before and after the event.

Amazon didn't reveal sales numbers from its third annual Prime Day, which was extended by six hours this year. The company said only that revenue grew 60% from last year and was bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In 2016, the e-commerce company's sales grew 27% to $136 billion. Amazon's Echo Dot mini-speaker, which was discounted by 30%, was the top-selling item at this year's event.