A Recap of Amazon Prime Day

Another year, another optimized Prime Day. Longer hours, more ways to shop, and no 'dogs', saw Amazon record higher sales than its Black Friday and Cyber Monday events combined.

According to Amazon, 100 million Prime members purchased over 175 million items, bringing-in an estimated $5.8bil of revenue. Part of this was due to longer hours – 48 this year, up from 36 last time.

Smart technology dominated: the Fire TV Stick with Alexa Remote was the top-seller globally; with a strong showing from Ring and Blink wireless home security devices, iRobot’s Roomba 690 vacuum, My Q Smart Garage Door Opener, and Amazon Smart Plug.

It wasn’t all good though. Although there was no repeat of 2018’s site outage, customers were unable to add to basket for around two hours on Monday. (Napkin math puts this at $204m in missed sales.) Also, whilst the event is reported to have significantly increased Prime memberships, questions remain about their longevity.

The halo effect across retail continued: competitors such as Best Buy and Walmart saw sales jump across the two days and even those smaller brands – that traditionally see a decline in revenue during the period – recorded an average 28% uplift!

There was innovation too. Amazon’s live-stream gaming site hosted 'Twitch Sells Out'. Lady Gaga’s ‘Haus Laboratories’ beauty line ‘launched’, albeit with two-month wait times. Finally, Amazon took inspiration from Alibaba’s Singles Day ‘retail-tainment’, in the form of a Prime Day concert headlined by Taylor Swift.