The world’s economic woes of inflation and rising interest rates hasn’t stopped Amazon making a record financial killing from its latest Prime Day sales.
US online sales from the two-day shopping event rose 6.1 percent from last year to $US12.7bn.
The rationale for the increased spend is that consumers are more vigilant about price and will wait for big discounting events such as Prime Day to make strategic purchases.
But Amazon sales are up generally across the year. According to Statista, Amazon’s net sales in the first quarter of 2023 raked in $US127.4bn, which is above the $US116.4bn in the same quarter of 2022.
Amazon, in a statement, said the first day of Prime day, July 11, was the single largest sales day in the company’s history.
“Over the course of the two-day shopping event, Prime members purchased more than 375 million items worldwide and saved more than $2.5 billion on millions of deals across the Amazon store, helping make it the biggest Prime Day event ever, the statement said.
Amazon partly attributes the success to a wider range of deals on offer this year. Home, fashion, and beauty were among the top-selling deal categories, with Fire TV Stick, LANEIGE Lip Glowy Balm, Apple AirPods, and Bissell Little Green Portable Deep Cleaner among the top-selling deals.
It said small businesses Caraway, True Classic, and TUSHY increased their average daily sales in Amazon’s store by over 18 times during the first day of the Prime Day event when compared to 2023 leading up to Prime Day.
Amazon claimed the savings for consumers across the two-day event came in at $US2.5bn.
Amazon has rolled out a “Buy with Prime” feature in the US which lets customers receive fast and free delivery of goods bought at online retailers beyond Amazon.
“Merchants who participated in Prime Day activities, in aggregate, experienced a 10 time increase in daily Buy with Prime orders and saw an 8 times increase in daily revenue from those orders during the Prime Day event period versus the month before we announced Prime Day,” says Amazon.
