Bloomberg reports that Amazon is saying that "its second annual Prime Day promotion was the company’s biggest sales day ever," with US orders up more than 50 percent and worldwide orders up more than 60 percent over last year.
The story notes that "Amazon created Prime Day to entice people to sign up for its $99-a-year membership, which offers free two-day shipping as well as free video and music streaming. How many signed up this time isn’t known, but the company sold a record number of its own gadgets. Deals for tablets, Kindles and the voice-activated Echo speaker were plastered all over the home page. The video-streaming Fire TV stick was the best-selling Amazon gadget and helped the company triple last year’s Prime Day sales of in-house devices."
The story notes that "Amazon created Prime Day to entice people to sign up for its $99-a-year membership, which offers free two-day shipping as well as free video and music streaming. How many signed up this time isn’t known, but the company sold a record number of its own gadgets. Deals for tablets, Kindles and the voice-activated Echo speaker were plastered all over the home page. The video-streaming Fire TV stick was the best-selling Amazon gadget and helped the company triple last year’s Prime Day sales of in-house devices."
- KC's View:
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While reports say that there were some technical glitches, as well as some complaints about product availability, it seems that Prime Day is likely to be a regular part of the Amazon ecosystem for the foreseeable future. (I've always found the availability questions to be a little amusing, since that can happen to every kind of retailer during any sort of clearance sale. But expectations are higher for Amazon, and so it must suffer a few slings and arrows.
The fact is that Prime is an extraordinary engine for Amazon's growth. Its members tend to spend $1200 annually on Amazon, as opposed to the $500 spent by non-Prime members, and the retailer reportedly added as many as 19 million new Prime members over the past year, and now has over 63 million.
Amazon is expert at creating an ecosystem that makes it the first, best option for almost everything ... and in so many ways, the Prime members (and the Subscribe and Save members) have become the connective tissue bringing it all together.
