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Amazon’s Second ‘Prime Day’ Becomes Biggest Sales Day
Customer orders in the United States were up more than 50 percent compared with last year’s event.
Customer orders in the United States were up more than 50 percent compared with last year’s event.
New York--If this year’s event is any indication, Amazon’s Prime Day will just keep on rolling.
The e-commerce giant said that the 2016 Prime Day, held this past Tuesday, was its “biggest day ever” in sales, and the company already has confirmed that it will hold the event again next year.
The event was only open to Amazon Prime members, the shoppers who pay $99 a year for free shipping and other benefits. (Amazon regularly offers a 30-day free trial membership to Prime, which means those who were not already members could shop on Prime Day too.)
Though it didn’t release any final sales figures, Amazon said that this year’s orders surpassed Prime Day 2015 by more than 50 percent in the United States and 60 percent worldwide.
Small businesses and sellers on Amazon offering deals to Prime members, meanwhile, saw orders nearly triple year-over-year both in the U.S. and globally, and orders placed via the Amazon app more than doubled.
The strongest performers were Amazon devices, with strong sales for each category including Fire TV, Fire tablets and Kindle e-readers.
But even with the strong sales, the second annual Prime Day was not without its issues.
Complaints started popping up on the Internet in the middle of the day from customers who weren’t able to add items to their shopping carts, which Amazon fixed within hours. The e-commerce giant would not comment on whether the glitch caused it to lose sales.
When Amazon launched Prime Day last year to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the sales results of the inaugural event beat those from Amazon’s Black Friday event the year before, which up to that point was its biggest sales day to date.
Last year’s event also saw a few kinks that needed to be worked out before Tuesday’s sales day, with many shoppers complaining about the quality and selection of the products offered. Amazon said it worked with vendors this year to increase the inventory of offered items.
Prime Day also has sparked responses from a number of large retail competitors, including five days of free shipping with no minimum purchase and a slate of discounts from Walmart as well as large sales events from J.C. Penney, Kohl’s, and many others.
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