Amazon’s Prime Day 2017 set a new sales record for the company.
The online retailer says sales on July 11 were higher than Black Friday or Cyber Monday 2016, “making it the biggest day ever in Amazon history.” The event “grew by more than 60% compared to the same 30 hours last year,” Amazon said in a statement, though it was unclear if that was in terms of sales or some other measuring stick.
More clear, though, were the big sales winners. The Echo Dot was the most popular item with buyers. Other Amazon hardware items, like Echo, Fire tablets, and Kindle eReaders also hit one-day sales records.
Perhaps more importantly for the company’s long-term outlook was the spike in Amazon Prime signups. Amazon, as usual, didn’t give any hard numbers on subscriptions, but said more new members joined the premium program on Tuesday than any single day in the company’s history.
(Prior to Prime Day, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimated 80 million people were Prime members, up from 58 million at the same time in 2016.)
Other highlights of the day:
- Customers purchased more than 3.5 million toys.
- More than 200,000 light bulbs were sold.
- “Tens of millions” of customers used the Amazon App—and orders from it more than doubled this year. (The app was one of the best ways to track deals of interest.)
Outside of Amazon’s own products, the best selling items on Prime Day in the U.S. were a programmable pressure cooker and a home DNA ancestry kit. Shoppers in the U.K. preferred a Wi-Fi Smart Plug and the PlayStation 4, while Japan bought lots of Whey Protein and “Happy Belly pure bottled water.”
This marks the third consecutive year Amazon has seen a notable sales bump on Prime Day (even though some of the ‘deals’ actually had higher prices than other shopping events). Now deal watchers (and investors) are wondering how—and if—the company will top the numbers this November when Black Friday rolls around.
