Prime Day Sale: Unraveling the Highs and Lows of Amazon’s Flagship Event

Another year, another round of media frenzy, and another set of records broken.

In only three years, Amazon’s Prime Day has evolved into one of the landmark sale events of the shopper’s calendar. Reports indicate that this year’s sale made a major splash, raking in over $4.2 billion in sales — a 33% increase compared to last year. Also, the retail behemoth shipped over 100 million products during the 36-hour sale. Amazon stated that they “welcomed more new Prime members on July 16 than on any other previous day in Prime history.”

The much talked about website outage added some spice and drama to the proceedings during the first hour. However, this was fixed quickly.

This year is also the first Prime Day with Whole Foods, Amazon’s most expensive acquisition, giving US shoppers unprecedented incentives to shop at the physical stores of the grocery retailer.

However, Prime Day is not just about the US, but a truly global event. In India, as part of its promotions for Prime Day, Amazon leveraged VR to have people experience the products in their true form factor at select malls.

At DataWeave, our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform enabled us to keep an eye on the pricing and discounts of products during the sale. We tracked Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.in before (14th July) and during the sale (16th July) and monitored several product types in Electronics, Men’s Fashion, Women’s Fashion and Furniture categories. We captured information on the price, brand, rank on the category page, whether Prime was offered or not, etc. and analyzed the top 200 ranks in each product type listing page. To best indicate the additional value to shoppers during the sale, we focused our analysis only on additional discounts on products between the 14th and 16th of July.

Scrutinizing the data yielded some rather interesting insights:

Amazon UK was more aggressive with its discounts than the US and India across most categories, with Furniture being the only exception (highest discounts in the US).

To read the entire article on www.dataweave.com/blog, click here.