Prime Day Was Amazon’s Biggest Sales Day Ever

Amazon's Prime logo is displayed on computer screens.
Photograph by Daniel Acker—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Amazon boasted on Wednesday that its second annual Prime Day was its largest sales day ever, surpassing sales from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and last year’s Prime Day, individually.

Amazon debuted Prime Day last year as a one-day sale exclusively for members of its Prime subscription shopping service. The company’s goal is to create a new shopping holiday similar to Black Friday—the busy shopping extravaganza the day after Thanksgiving—to encourage more spending on its site.

While Prime Day is a manufactured shopping event, the sales could mean real revenue for Amazon. Retail advisory firm FBIC had predicted that Prime Day could generate $525 million in sales. If that is accurate, that would be up 26% from its $415 million estimate last year.

Amazon said customer orders surpassed Prime Day 2015 by more than 60% worldwide and more than 50% in the United States. It was also the biggest day ever for sales of Amazon devices, including Fire TV, Fire tablets, Kindle e-readers, and Alexa-enabled devices such as Echo and Tap.

Amazon said that Prime Day brought the biggest sales day ever for Amazon’s hit home automation device, Echo. The company’s TV streaming device, Fire TV Stick, was the best-selling device globally.

The company also touted sales for its third-party sellers. These sellers, who offered Prime Day discounts, saw orders nearly triple year-over-year on Prime Day globally.

Amazon also sold more than than two million toys, more than one million pairs of shoes, approximately 90,000 TVs, and hundreds of thousands of Kindle e-readers on Prime Day.

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Amazon’s other goal for the Prime Day was to encourage more consumers to adopt its Prime service, which for $99 a year—among many benefits—offers customers free two-day delivery and access to Amazon’s TV and movie streaming service. Prime enrollments peaked on July 14 last year, one day before Prime Day.

The e-commerce giant said that Prime member orders on the Amazon mobile app was up more than 100% from Prime Day 2015, and that more than a million customers used the Amazon mobile app for the first time on Prime Day to shop and monitor deals.

Prime Day actually debuted to a rocky start with many customers reporting technical problems while checking out and then expressing their frustration over social media.

But clearly, sales rebounded.

 

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