Amazon Squashes Consumer Concerns With Record Prime Day
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) scored its best day ever Tuesday during its second annual Prime Day.
Company shares touched a new record on the news.
Customer orders surged over 60% globally and more than 50% in the U.S., according to the e-commerce giant.
The success was thanks, in part, to Amazon branded products like Alexa-enabled sound systems and Kindle e-readers, which had their best sales day ever.
While the company did not disclose the total number of items sold, it surpassed the 34.4 million items sold worldwide on last year’s Prime Day, which also broke all Black Friday records with 398 items ordered per second, according to the company.
Leading up to Tuesday’s one-day sale extravaganza, which was accessible only to Amazon Prime members, shoppers were concerned that the event would not live up to expectations; Best-selling items sold out quickly last year and deep discounts were largely offered on more unpopular items.
Prime Day Sales Highlights
• More than two million toys and more than one million pairs of shoes
• More than 90,000 TVs
• Over 215,000 Instant Pot 7-in-1 Multi-Functional Pressure Cookers
• Over 200,000 headphones
• Over 24,000 Double Hammocks by Vivere.
• Over 23,000 iRobot Roomba 614 Vacuum Cleaning Robots.
• Over 14,000 Lenovo laptops.
But Amazon was determined to turn around their strategy this year by “increasing the number of deals and at the same time, increasing the volume of inventory behind those deals,†a spokesperson told FOXBusiness.com ahead of Prime Day.
Customers on the morning of Prime Day expressed frustration on Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) about an apparent technical glitch on the site that prevented them from completing their purchases. Amazon tweeted that it was working to fix the problem, and it was resolved not long after.
Preliminary data from Priceblink, an online comparison tool, found that 12/13 Prime Day deals were the lowest prices consumers could find – an average of 30% from the next lowest price.
The motive of course behind Prime Day is to get more shoppers to purchase the Prime service, which costs $99 a year for unlimited access to two-day shipping and the Amazon Video streaming service. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that as of June, 52% (63 million) of all Amazon customers in the U.S. are Prime members, up from 19 million members one year ago.
