To no one’s great surprise, early reports indicate Prime Day outdid previous years by wide margins. In a July 17 press release, Amazon said Prime Day sales on July 15 and 16 exceed the combined sales during 2018’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events.
Amazon doesn’t release sales dollar amounts but stated that Prime members worldwide purchased more than 175 million items. In the course of all that spending, according to Amazon, Prime members saved more than $1 billion during the two-day sales push.
Prime memberships leaped
Only Amazon Prime members can take advantage of Prime Day deals. This year Amazon made a big push for new memberships, offering a 30-day free trial. Amazon also launched a new college student membership with a six-month free trial followed by a half-price Prime membership for a combined trial and paid period of up to four years.
The membership deals worked. According to the company, more new Prime members joined on July 15 than any previous day, and July 16 had almost as many sign-ups. Prime members from 18 countries shopped during Prime Day, twice the number of countries in the 2014’s inaugural Prime Day event.
Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos expressed Amazon’s gratitude. “We want to thank Prime members all around the world,” Bezos said in a statement. “Members purchased millions of Alexa-enabled devices, received tens of millions of dollars in savings by shopping from Whole Foods Market, and bought more than $2 billion of products from independent small and medium-sized businesses. Huge thank you to Amazonians everywhere who made this day possible for customers.”
Echo Dots, Fire TV Sticks, strawberries, cherries, and blueberries, too
The best-selling deals around the world were Amazon devices, specifically the Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, and the Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote. You can add untold millions of organic strawberries, cherries, and blueberries that went out the doors as the best-selling items at Whole Foods Markets where U.S. Prime members shopped.
Smart home devices
Each year smart home devices rack up mountains of sales. This year the biggest-selling smart home deals included the iRobot Roomba 960 Robot Vacuum, MyQ Smart Garage Door Opener Chamberlain MYQ-G0301, and the Amazon Smart Plug.
Ring and Blink devices doubled last year’s Prime Day unit sales and the Echo Show and Echo Show 5 smart displays had their highest sales numbers ever.
Fire Tablets had their Best Prime Day, lead by the new Fire 7 Tablet. Prime Day 2019 was also the best for Kindle e-readers.
What else sold?
In addition to more than 1 million toys, Prime members bought more than 100,000 lunchboxes, 100,000 laptops, 200,000 TVs, 1 million headphones, 350,000 luxury beauty products, 400,000 household pet products, and 650,000 household cleaning supplies. Other top sellers included more than 200,000 LifeStraw Personal Water Filters and 150,000 Crest 3D White Professional Effects Whitestrips Kits.
Sale leaders varied in other countries, but in the U.S., the big sellers included the LifeStraw Personal Water Filter, Instant Pot Duo60, and 23andMe Health and Ancestry kits.
