Prime Day was Biggest Day in the History of Amazon

Amazon knocked it out of the park on yesterday’s Prime Day with customer orders surpassing Prime Day 2015 by more than 60% worldwide and more than 50% in the United States. Amazon said it was also the biggest day ever for Amazon devices globally and set sales records for every Amazon device category including Kindle, Alexa, Fire TV, and Fire Tablets. Globally, the Fire TV Stick was Amazon’s best-selling device.

“Prime itself is the best deal in the history of shopping, and Prime Day was created as a special benefit exclusively for our Prime members,” said Greg Greeley, Vice President, Amazon Prime. “We want to thank our tens of millions of members around the world for making this the biggest day in the history of Amazon. We hope you had as much fun as we did. After yesterday’s results, we’ll definitely be doing this again.”

Small businesses and selling partners on Amazon with Prime deals had nearly triple year-over-year sales, both worldwide and in the US. “We offered customers our best products at great deals and they responded in a big way,” said Dov Brafman, CEO of Sharkk, which offers cool and unique audio solutions and other consumer accessories. “Prime Day helped us reach our highest sales day ever.”

“Sales were much higher than I was expecting with that 60% growth rate,” says R.J. Hottovy on CNBC. Hottovy is a Consumer Equity Strategist at Morningstar. “That will probably put the company ahead of where it was last year. You are talking about sales in the $500 to $600 million range for this day alone. The real take-a-ways for me are that international markets seem to be adopting Prime and competing sales from the likes of Walmart don’t seem to be impacting Amazon sales at all. We estimate there are more than 70 million Prime members globally, about 80% of that, or 56 million, coming from the US. What it has shown is that there is real stickiness to this business.”

The real impact of Prime Day for Amazon is not sales but in enticing more “sticky” Prime memberships. “Sales are really besides the point, it’s about driving Prime membership,” said Shelly Banjo of Bloomberg. “One estimate had Amazon adding 6 million Prime members. What that does is lock you in an average of 7 years according to one estimate. Prime is Amazon’s secret sauce.”

People get “hooked on Prime” she says and no longer making shopping lists to go to Walmart or somewhere else. Instead they think of something to buy and with a couple clicks of the phone it’s done.

Rich Ord