Amazon’s Prime Day 2019 is officially over. And like clockwork, the retailer has issued a press release with some of the highlights for the event. Stating that it was bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. Prime members spent a total of $2 billion over those two days. And bought over 175 million product.
Also like clockwork, it was the biggest day for Amazon devices ever. This is something we hear every year for Prime Day and then again for Black Friday. This is because Amazon usually discounts these products even cheaper than ever before, to make sure they get into as many hands as possible. This is particularly true for Fire tablets and Echo devices. As these get customers to use Amazon more, and thus bring in more money.
In the US, Amazon says that a “record number of Prime members shopped” during Prime Day. Those members bought over 100,000 lunchboxes, 200,000 TVs, 300,000 headphones and over a million toys. Just to name a few categories. Amazon also noted that American Prime Members saved tens of millions when shopping at Whole Foods Market. And the best-selling products there were organic strawberries, red cherries and blueberries.
Some other interesting facts for Prime Day include many smart home devices being sold. The big ones were the iRobot Roomba 690, the MyQ Smart Garage Door Opener and the Amazon Smart Plug. That smart plug isn’t a big surprise, since it was bundled with most smart home products during Prime Day. Amazon also notes that customers twice as many Ring and Blink products as they did during Prime Day last year.
What’s interesting here is that the Echo Show was a big seller for Amazon, and it was the biggest day for Echo devices with screens, in history. Particularly for the Echo Show 5, which had just launched and was already down to $50. Amazon says that customers also purchased twice as many Fire TV Edition Smart TVs when compared to last year’s Prime Day.
Basically, what Amazon is trying to say is, Prime Day continues to get bigger and bigger every single year. While it did start out as a pretty mediocre shopping event five years ago, it has blossomed into a sort of “Black Friday in July” sale, that many other retailers are taking advantage of, and not just Amazon. Selling $2 billion worth of products over a two-day period, is not too shabby. Especially considering that beat the two biggest shopping holidays combined – Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
This year, Amazon focused more on discounting its own hardware like the Fire TV, Fire Tablets, Echo devices and the like. Which is smart for Amazon to do, as it gets these users to use Amazon services more and more. Which is going to drive in more revenue for Amazon, and that’s the end goal for the company anyways. We didn’t see as many popular products on sale this time around, which was a big difference from last year’s event. Like many of Samsung’s smartwatches, many of iRobot’s vacuums (some were discounted, but many were not). That we’ll have to wait for Black Friday to get.