Today marks the start of Amazon.com summer sales-palooza, Prime Day.
As Bloomberg reports, for the next 36 hours, prices for portable air mattresses are down by 31%, over-ear wireless headphones by 30% and all those Amazon Echos and Fire tablets are at fire-sale prices. Also this year, Jeff Bezos and Co. are using the event to bring Whole Foods grocery stores further under the Amazon umbrella by having sales on food as well.
Most observers have assumed Prime Day is a knockoff of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Singles Day, an annual shopping bonanza the Chinese e-commerce giant started in 2009 and which generated an astounding $25 billion in sales last year.
But Singles Day is in November, kicking off a busy buying season in China. Prime Day has more in common with events like Nordstrom’s Half-Yearly Sale, a door-buster meant to relieve the retail industry’s doldrums of summer.
Discussions inside Amazon about creating a “Christmas in summer” go back to the mid-2000s, say former Amazon executives. Bezos wanted to utilize all the fulfillment space, technology and workers in Amazon’s warehouses during the summer lull, when people spend more money on vacations than flat-panel TVs and laptops.
A decade passed before the increase in Amazon’s size and Prime membership numbers started to make the blowout sale plausible.The first Prime Day was in 2015.
A lot about Prime Day has evolved since then. Amazon now uses the sale to prominently feature its own Kindle, Fire and Echo hardware, as well as couches, dresses, batteries, fish-oil and time-released Vitamin B12, under several dozen Amazon-owned brands, like Amazon Basics and Solimo. Amazon now has more private-label brands than ever and can better control the scope and scale of the discounts on these items.
The other thing that’s changed about Prime Day during its short life is the secrecy surrounding it. The date is kept secret for months, which hints at the company’s corporate strategy for the future.
