With the sequel to Amazon Prime Day upon us, Slice Intelligence thought it would be useful to look back at what we learned from Amazon’s first Prime Day in order to guide our preparation for tomorrow’s analysis.
Here’s what we found last year:
Prime Day was big: In fact Prime Day was the second largest sales day for Amazon in 2015, despite the fact that the sale was placed in the middle of summer. Total Amazon sales (including both first party and Marketplace sales) were 3.5 percent higher than Black Friday 2015. Only Cyber Monday surpassed Prime Day in 2015. Sales on Prime Day 2015 were 4 times higher than the average day during the rest of July 2015.
Amazon’s big spenders showed up in force last year: Those that placed an average of three or more orders per month in the six months prior to Prime Day showed up in a big way on Prime Day, accounting for 68 percent of sales that day.
Amazon made some headway with new buyers: three percent of Prime Day buyers hadn’t bought from Amazon in the six months prior to Prime Day, and their spending accounting for three percent of sales. This group stuck around as these shoppers went on to spend $198 dollars, per person, in the six months after Prime Day.
Competitors’ efforts to draft off of Prime Day fell short: Recognizing that Prime Day might encourage consumers to blow the dust off of their credit cards and buy online, Walmart.com created its own sale, rolling back prices on many items on Prime Day. Walmart did indeed boost its sales for the day, with July 15, 2015 generating 3.5 times the revenue of the average July 2015 day. But those sales fell well short of Amazon, accounting for only three percent of Amazon’s Prime Day sales volume.
The only disappointment Amazon suffered on Prime Day was a high level of negative buzz on social media, where there were many complaints about out of stocks on key sale items.
2016 Prime Day ought to be interesting. The first Prime Day taught us that it is possible to create a sales holiday that successfully caters to a company's heaviest spenders while also encouraging bringing in new customers. This will undoubtedly encourage Amazon to increase stock levels to avoid customer frustration, and maximize revenue. And competitors will line up to draft off of Amazon. Already Walmart, Target, Sears and Banana Republic have announced big sales that overlap with Prime Day.
How will tomorrow’s Prime Day sales compare with the first holiday? Will Amazon continue to roll more people into its Prime loyalty program? Will competitors enjoy a sales bump thanks to their rival’s efforts to prompt shoppers into buying mode when they might ordinarily be at the beach?
We’ll soon see.
About this data
With a panel of over 4 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.
Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.
Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world.