Prime Day can serve as a precursor to the holiday shopping season.
Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Day sales rose nearly 12 percent in the first seven hours of the event compared with the same period last year, according to Momentum Commerce, which manages 50 brands across multiple product categories.
Early results point to a strong Prime Day performance, the company said, as sales during the 2023 event spiked in the first few hours. Momentum, which manages sales on Amazon on behalf of brands including Crocs, Lego and Beats by Dre, generates about $7 billion in sales on Amazon annually, giving it a great benchmark for judging Prime Day performance.
“Consumers continue to spend, but they’re doing it strategically, which can benefit a sale like Prime Day,” said Sky Canaves, an analyst at EMarketer Inc. “I think we’ll see consumers buy things like headphones and chargers instead of expensive electronics like laptops.”
According to Numerator, a market research firm that tracks Amazon sales by sampling households, the average household spent about $100 on Prime Day purchases as of noon New York time. Top-selling items included protein shakes, the Amazon Fire TV Stick streaming device, sunscreen and Amazon’s Happy Belly-branded grocery items.
Amazon launched Prime Day in 2015 to attract new subscribers, who pay $139 a year for discounted shipping, video streaming and other perks. The event helps the company retain holiday shoppers and deepen relationships with existing customers by offering exclusive deals on gadgets and other products. About 180 million people in the U.S. had Prime memberships in March, up 8 percent from a year earlier, according to market research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.
Prime Day can serve as a bellwether for the holiday season. Adobe Inc. estimates that online sales from all retailers will total $14 billion during the two-day event, up nearly 11 percent from last year. EMarketer gave a more moderate estimate of 6 percent growth to $13.8 billion in U.S. online spending during the Prime Day sale, with direct sales on Amazon rising 5.5 percent to $8.2 billion.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a frequent critic of Amazon, released a preliminary report timed to Prime Day alleging that the surge in business during sales makes it more likely that Amazon workers will be injured while processing orders. Amazon is also fighting accusations from the federal government and its home state of Washington that it is exposing workers to injury risks.
“Prime Day and the holiday season are marked by extremely high volume and intense pressure to work long hours and ignore safety guidelines,” said a report released Monday based on interviews with more than 100 Amazon workers in the U.S.
According to Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel, the report “draws sweeping and inaccurate conclusions based on unverified anecdotes, and distorts years-old documents and contains factual errors and faulty analyses.”
First print: Jul 17, 2024 | 12:10 AM IST