Prime Day 2023 was a winner, based on data from Adobe Analytics, with an estimated $12.7 billion spent over the two days in the U.S., up 6.7% from $11.9 billion last year, and Amazon called day one on July 11 its single largest sales day ever, with 375 million items sold worldwide.
Considering the state of the economy and consumer sentiment, that kind of a result is quite an achievement. Parents doubtless took the opportunity to grab some early deals for students, aided by twin back to school and off to college guides from Amazon.
Broken out, sales on day one of Prime were $6.4 billion on day one, up nearly 6%, and $6.3 billion on day two, a gain of 6.4% from last year, Adobe Analytics reported.
Amazon’s Buy With Prime program, which lets retailers offer Prime benefits on their ecommerce sites, was a factor during Prime Day, the company said. Through promotions across Amazon channels, including banner placements on Amazon.com, influencer content and digital awareness campaigns, merchants saw a 10x increase in daily Buy With Prime orders and an 8x bump in daily revenue vs. a month prior.
Buy Now Pay Later Still a Driver
On day one, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) orders accounted for 6.4% of Prime Day orders, or $461 million in revenue, up 19.5% from last year, Adobe Analytics reported.
This comes even as some of the major BNPL providers are facing market challenges and layoffs. The most popular categories where shoppers utilized BNPL were apparel, furniture/home and electronics.
Pricing Insights
Data from Noogata showed some interesting insights into pricing strategy on Prime Day. While’s it’s marketed as a deal and discount extravaganza – with Amazon claiming Prime members saved a total of $2.5 billion – some companies with significant brand power took the opportunity to actually raise prices.
Based on scans of millions of listings on Amazon, Noogata found 45.4% of the top 10,000 selling items during Prime Day were offered at discounts of 3% or more, up from 39.3% in 2022. Still, prices were raised by that same amount on 13% of top-selling items, down a bit from 13.7% last year.
One noteworthy brand is luggage maker Samsonite, which according to Noogata raised the price on a popular item by a whopping 114.7% during Prime Day last year, and by 88.7% this year.
Here is how some other major brands priced their offerings on Prime Day 2023:
Pricing Strategy on Prime Day 2023
| Biggest Savings | |
| Amazon | -27.69% |
| Ring | -19.43% |
| Sony | -14.30% |
| OtterBox | -12.94% |
| Neutrogena | -10.17% |
| Barbie | -9.43% |
| Samsung | -9.35% |
| Largest Price Increases | |
| Steve Madden | 15.7% |
| Crayola | 10.7% |
| Conair | 8.7% |
| New Balance | 8.2% |
| Under Armour | 5.4% |
| Nike | 4.6% |
| Amazon Renewed | 1.34% |
Source: Noogata
Consumer Sentiment on Twitter
According to data from Semrush, an analysis of tweets between July 5 and July 12 skewed positive, with 71% being positive, 20% being neutral and 9% marked as negative.
The top 5 hashtags used, Semrush found, were #primeday, #amazon, #ad, #amazonprimeday and #deals.
Marketing Drivers
Investments in email marketing for Prime Day saw the greatest gain in terms of revenue lift, up 13% over 2022, followed by affiliate and partner marketing (up 10%) and display ads (up 6%), according to Adobe Analytics.