Prime Day, Amazon’s annual bargain festival, may start this year on 13 October. For a moment it was feared that the two-day festival, with high discounts and exclusive deals, would not take place at all due to the corona crisis, but now there seems to be a date.
Holidays cancelled
Amazon associates who had applied for a holiday on 13 October and the following days – up to and including 20 October – were confronted with a ‘vacation blackout’, CNET discovered. Something big has to happen on those dates at the retail platform, and according to the news site this can hardly be anything other than the annual Amazon Prime Day.
The online retailer’s bargain festival normally takes place every year in July, but this time, due to the corona crisis, it was postponed until a date to be determined. Since then, however, the retailer has remained silent for so long that the question arose as to whether the shopping event would take place at all. After all, at the end of June Amazon organised an alternative sale of clothing and in early August Prime Day already took place exclusively in India.
Strategic period
So now a date would have been set, even though the news has not yet been confirmed by Amazon. The company only wanted to say that this year’s bargain marathon would take place in the fourth quarter. Retailwatchers, however, call the leaked dates plausible, because the biggest surge in online orders due to corona is now behind us and the end of year period is already in sight.
Amazon Prime Day could be a foretaste for Black Friday and Cyber Monday a little later, although many American retailers are in doubt as to whether they want to participate in times of corona. Moreover, it is a good time for Amazon to make itself heard again, because the brand new Prime-rival Walmart+ was launched at the beginning of this month.
It is striking that this time the starting day would be a Tuesday. In previous years, the online event always started on a Monday and lasted for 48 hours. Also, it would be short notice to arrange the necessary product deals and advertisements within three weeks.
