Best Prime Day ever boosts competition as well

This past Prime Day was the most successful one yet for Amazon – keeping in mind the ‘tradition’ is still young. The hype surrounding it also gave a boost to its main competitors in e-commerce, however.

“Biggest event”

Amazon has announced that this Prime Day was a major success. During the two-day event, the e-commerce giant sold 175 million items worldwide, topping the combined results of Black Friday and Cyber Monday at the end of last year. Amazon also welcomed more new Prime members than ever before during the Prime Day event.

“We want to thank Prime members all around the world”, CEO Jeff Bezos said: they “purchased millions of Alexa-enabled devices, received tens of millions of dollars in savings by shopping from Whole Foods Market and bought more than 2 billion dollars of products from independent small and medium-sized businesses.” Some specific sales numbers may help to put the huge size of the event in sharp focus: in the United States alone, Amazon sold over 100,000 laptops, 200,000 TV sets and more than a quarter million headphones.

Riding the coattails

The hype surrounding Prime Day also caused other retailers to profit from sales hunters. According to Adobe Analystics data, the turnover of major e-commerce companies increased by 68 % during the event. In response to Prime Day, major players such as Walmart, eBay and Best Buy came up with all sorts of promotions of their own.

The effect was less clearly visible with smaller companies, but they also got a slice of the pie: online turnover for these retailers increased by 28 % on average. Only last year, Prime Day caused their sales figures to go down.