Prime Day saw 175 million items purchased by the 100 million-plus Prime members over the two days, according to Amazon, eclipsing its 2018 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined.
Although Amazon doesn’t cite a gross merchandise value (GMV) figure for Prime Day, analysts estimated the haul at $6 billion to $6.2 billion, according to Yahoo Finance.
CEO Jeff Bezos did say in a release that over $2 billion in sales were realized by small-to-medium-sized sellers during Prime day. The biggest sellers in the U.S. according to Amazon were the LifeStraw Personal Water Filter – also a 2018 bestseller – the Instant Pot DUO60, and 23andMe Health + Ancestry kits.
Some other eye-popping category numbers from Amazon: Over the two days Prime members purchased more than 100,000 lunchboxes (it seems lots of kids still use these), 100,000 laptops, 200,000 TVs, 300,000 headphones, 350,000 luxury beauty products, 400,000 pet products, 650,000 household cleaning supplies and more than one million toys.
Given the flood of business flowing to Amazon, it was understandable that service levels would be challenged, according to the Wall Street Journal, even as the company has been continually beefing up its own fulfillment capabilities. Amazon did say that millions of items shipped in one day or faster, outpacing past Prime Days.
By contrast, Target, Walmart, Best Buy and other competitors played up their same-day delivery and pickup capabilities from massive store networks during the two-day event, as well as the fact that the deals didn’t require membership like Prime’s $119 per year price tag. It can also be argued, of course, that they were all buoyed by the rising tide.
According to data from Adobe Analytics, Prime Day two saw U.S. online sales increase 72% for large retailers ($1 billion or more in annual revenue), compared to an average Tuesday. This was up a bit from Monday, when the increase was 64%. On both days, overall spending eclipsed $2 billion, Adobe said, a phenomenon usually limited to Cyber Weekend.
Smaller retailers with less than $5 million in annual revenue saw a 25% rise in ecommerce sales on day two, compared to 30% on Monday. This category saw sales decline during Prime Day 2018, Adobe said, indicating they had figured out how to take better advantage of the event.
Tuesday saw more Prime Day spending, according to Adobe, mainly due to an increase in conversion, accounting for 65% of the lift, compared to 33% from increased site visits and 12% from larger order baskets.
Out of total revenue from the five major flash sales held on July 15 and 16, including Prime Day, research firm Edison Trends found that Amazon grabbed an 87% share, compared with 4% each for Walmart and eBay, 3% for Best Buy and 2% for Target. The analysis was based on anonymized and aggregated ecommerce receipt data from millions of U.S. consumers.
Amazon’s page load times and uptime, critical to ecommerce conversion rates, were also good on Prime Day, according to data from Catchpoint. The company did have site stumbles last year with periods of downtime and unavailability – but there were plenty of cute Amazonian dogs to mollify angry customers.
“Despite the heavy Prime Day traffic, over the past 48 hours Amazon’s website loaded faster than Walmart’s, with flawless availability,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. “They’re using their huge infrastructure to its full advantage.”
According to Catchpoint, average desktop load times over all of Prime Day were 2.43 seconds for Amazon, 1.68 seconds for eBay, 3.85 seconds for Walmart, 4.45 seconds for Best Buy and 4 seconds for Target. On mobile, they were 1.03 seconds for Amazon, 1.33 second for eBay, 3.27 seconds for Walmart, 3.74 seconds for Best Buy and 3.86 seconds for Target.
Amazon’s average web page load times performed just as fast as last week, with full desktop and mobile site availability, Daoudi said.
According to data from website metrics tracker Jumpshot, Nike.com saw the largest percentage increase in ecommerce transactions over Prime Day 2018, up 153% to 54,300, followed by Gap (up 100% to 270,000), Best Buy (up 60% to 110,200), Sam’s Club (up 48% to 66,600) and Kohl’s (up 42% to 205,600). Amazon itself had a 20% gain, to 15.5 million transactions. The biggest Prime Day losers, according to Jumpshot, were Jet.com (down 79% to 2,900), Sears (down 50% to 14,300) and Lowe’s (down 37% to 65,300).
Search optimization firm Constructor.io found that non-Amazon merchants running sales during Prime Day saw search volume increase on average over 500%. The biggest lifts were in apparel categories, while grocery saw the smallest gains. Purchase intent was high on these sites, with four times the number of purchases compared to a typical two-day period. Constructor.io analyzed search and purchase behavior across its ecommerce customers during Prime Day, totaling millions of search queries per day.