Prime Day 2021: Record-Breaking Sales Amidst Changes
A look back on the history of Amazon Prime Day and an examination of Prime Day 2021.
Since its debut in 2015, Amazon’s Prime Day has earned the company billions of dollars while altering the global retail market. This annual 48-hour event offers Prime members exclusive discounts on thousands of products. However, Prime Day faces criticism each year, particularly for offering unsatisfactory discounts on undesirable items. #PrimeDayFail trended on Twitter during its inaugural year. Even so, each year, webpages and billboards promote Prime Day deals with the benefit of two-day shipping, a selling point for a Prime subscription. This year, Prime Day took place across 20 countries on June 21 and 22, starting with a show hosted by Billie Eilish, H.E.R., and Kid Cudi.
CNBC’s Annie Palmer explains that “Prime Day is no longer just a day for people to purchase cheap items on Amazon. Quite frankly, it has completely altered the retail calendar.” In order to compete with Prime Day discounts, other major retailers ran sales during the surrounding days: Target’s “Target Deal Days’” ran from June 20 to 22, while Best Buy had their “Bigger Deal Savings Event” which began on June 15 and ended on June 22. Prime Day normally takes place in July, but was early this year due to the attention-grabbing Olympic Games, which meant competing corporations immediately made the shift as well, ensuring their sales overlapped. Even with competing retailers, Prime Day is undoubtedly one of the biggest sales of the year. In 2019, Amazon reported that Prime Day sales exceeded the previous year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined. Similar reporting was notably absent following Prime Day in 2020 — most likely due to its coronavirus-related delay, which pushed the 2020 event to October — but the company still reported $3.5 billion in sales from third-party sellers alone. The event also extended the focus on smaller businesses, a topic of debate surrounding Amazon for years.
Despite earning Amazon significant profits, Prime Day poses a threat to small and medium-sized businesses. A survey conducted by Lendio in 2019 found that “two out of three small business owners said they view large corporations, such as Amazon and Google, as having a negative impact on growth opportunities.” This risk to smaller companies is exacerbated during Prime Day, during which small businesses often cannot compete with Amazon’s drastic discounts. However, many small and medium-sized businesses choose to sell through Amazon, and the company has utilized incentives for customers to shop small. During Prime Day 2020 and 2021, Amazon offered a $10 credit when customers purchased from select small businesses. This year, that promotion began on June 7 and ran through the end of Prime Day. An Amazon representative relayed the promotion’s success, telling The New York Times that “in the first 24 hours of the promotion, more than 2.5 million customers purchased small business products.” Promotions continued as the official start approached, and they proved beneficial.
This year’s Prime Day (referred to by Amazon as the “two biggest days ever”) was heavily promoted, with many of the two million deals being announced early to garner excitement. Upon the sale’s kickoff, customers visited Amazon’s “Lightning Deals” page to keep up with limited time discounts on products such as Instant Pot, Keurig, and Echo Dot. The website featured countdowns to new deals and notified customers when prices dropped. This year’s event placed a particularly heavy focus on electronics and school supplies. Back-to-school, however, was still too far away for many customers. Shelley Kohan for Forbes explains that, “Many parts of the country [had] just ended or [were] about to end the school year, so many students and teachers [were] not yet planning for the upcoming school year, which may be a miss on the part of Amazon.” Even so, Amazon reported more than $11 billion in sales through the purchasing of over 250 million items. Adobe Analytics reports that this marks a 6.1% increase in revenue compared to Prime Day 2020. Additionally, $1.9 billion was spent on small business items through the $10 credit promotion, which is more than a 100% increase from 2020.
With Prime Day 2021 being earlier than ever, after a severely delayed Prime Day 2020, expectations were mixed, but the event was successful, even by Amazon’s standards.
