Did you enjoy Target Circle Week last week? Or Walmart’s July deals? The TikTok Store just had its deal days for you from July 9 to 11, while Temu Week, which runs until July 18, slashes prices by up to 90 percent. Now, this week, Amazon Prime Day is upon us. All of this comes not a moment after retail sales for the July 4th holiday, turning the entire month into a shopping haze. It’s time to buy, because it’s never time to buy.
None of this is an accident. Just like when big box retailers suddenly announced they were finally cutting food prices to fight inflation, it’s business strategy 101 to react to what the competition is doing. July has become a season for Big Blowout Deals because no store wants to be the one selling an air purifier at full price when Amazon has it for 25 percent off.
Amazon’s famous Prime Day sale is, in many ways, proof of the e-commerce giant’s sheer power: It invented a new holiday — now twice a year — that consumers have come to observe every summer. and autumn. It’s still the sales event of the season, complete with a Megan Thee Stallion ad in which she expresses how much she loves Prime, but competitors are increasingly trying to steal some of her attention — and this it is working. A new report from market research firm eMarketer predicts that, for the third year in a row, Amazon’s share of all online purchases made between July 16 and 17, when its Prime Day sale is taking place, will shrink . This speaks to the success of other retailers in attracting customers to their storefronts. Prime Day is still a successful 48-hour sales period — but not just for Amazon anymore.
The inaugural Prime Day was a one-day sale on July 15, 2015, tied to Amazon’s 20th anniversary and billed as bigger than Black Friday. It was a smart marketing maneuver—instead of competing only during established holiday sales seasons, Amazon created its own midsummer moment. (Walmart immediately announced its sale in July that same summer).
Prime Day was also a big billboard for a Prime subscription, which 40 million people had signed up for by 2015, according to market research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP). Today, CIRP estimates, there are about 180 million Prime members in the US, which is just over half of the country’s total population. This nation of loyal Prime subscribers helped turn Amazon, for many years a textbook case of a for-profit tech company, into a juggernaut. In the first quarter of 2024, the company earned $10.4 billion.
The original Prime Day deals were apparently a disappointment compared to the hype — it pushed a lot of Fire TV Sticks, still a Prime Day staple — but Amazon still sold about $900 million worth of stuff that day. Since then, consumers have given Amazon ever-increasing billions on Prime Days, reaching a record $12.7 billion over 48 hours last July.
“I think Amazon this year is mostly sticking to its tried and tested Prime Day playbook,” says Sky Canaves, a principal analyst at eMarketer. That means offering good deals that, in turn, drive more Prime signups. Some of the biggest discounts this year are invite-only deals from big brands that only Prime members can claim access to: A Peloton bike is 30 percent off, while a pair of Sony headphones is 55 percent off and a chronograph watch Citizen is discounted. by a rather massive 60 percent.
You can also expect many beauty products to go on sale. “Amazon has included more premium brands this year, especially in categories like beauty,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at consulting firm GlobalData. Clinique, for example, just became available on Amazon, joining the ranks of popular beauty brands like Dermalogica and Laneige already on the platform.
When there’s always a sale, is there ever a sale?
With Prime Day, Amazon introduced a new calendar event in the lives of American consumers. The problem is, when everyone has a sale sometime in the middle of July, those sales lose some of their luster.
Prime Day “used to be bigger,” says Michael Levin, one of the co-founders of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. “People got a little more attuned to it,” he says, both because Amazon added a second Prime Day event in October starting in 2022 and because every competitor started following the Prime Day playbook. “I think the excitement has generally worn off,” adds CIRP co-founder Josh Lowitz.
The fact that Prime Day sales growth has slowed considerably may be a reflection of that adjustment. Last year’s Prime Day revenue was 6.7 percent higher than in 2022 — still growing, albeit slowly. But in 2018, the sales event brought in 78 percent more revenue than the year before, according to a report by Capital One Shopping. . Google Trends data also shows that searches for “Prime Day” peaked around July 2018.
Amazon itself is partly to blame for tamping down a fiery part of Prime Minister’s Day. Not only does it have multiple Prime Days a year now, but it also held a huge spring sales event that was open to all customers, not just Prime members, and has also held smaller, more category-specific sales. “These incremental sales may have a small dampening effect on Prime Day,” says Canaves.
Amazon probably doesn’t mind too much, though, because having more frequent sales means it can capitalize on smaller but more frequent purchases on its site, whether for beauty products or health supplements, which come with a handy auto-recharge purchase option. At the time of writing, it’s not actually Prime Day yet, but Amazon already has plenty of “early” Prime Day deals available, too, further blurring the line between when the sale starts and ends. Even outside of big sales, products on Amazon are often discounted, its prices fluctuating millions of times a day. The Le Creuset Dutch Oven in Cerise is currently on sale for $297 instead of $460 and is not marked as a first day deal. Websites like Camelcamelcamel or Keepa make it incredibly easy to set up a price drop alert that you can set and forget instead of waiting for a sales event to start. According to Keepa, these Levi jeans see an average of six price cuts per month, a Coway air purifier about eight times per month, and Premier Protein Shakes — a bestseller during Prime Day October 2023 — a staggering 32 times per month. If you miss a good price, don’t worry. Just wait a few minutes.
Everyone is a competitor to Amazon
Online retailers are out in full force to offer their answer to Prime Day — and Amazon is clearly paying attention to the upstarts digging in. The Information recently reported that the US e-commerce giant is launching a cheaper clothing and home goods section with slow shipping direct from China, the same way Temu does business.
Amazon has long been synonymous with convenience: You can buy things with one click for delivery, sometimes the same day. It makes sense to offer customers a new slow shipping option if they want it, but it’s also a partial capitulation by Amazon that perhaps consumers not they actually need lightning fast delivery for everything. Price is king, and Chinese e-commerce companies like Temu making inroads into the US have an advantage here. Whether you’re shopping on Amazon or Temu, anything you buy is likely coming from a Chinese seller anyway.
Another area where Amazon’s competitors have an advantage: making shopping fun. “We like to say that Amazon is a better place to buy things than to buy things,” says CIRP’s Lowitz. “If you know what you want, Amazon is a fantastic place to shop. It’s easy, it’s reliable.” It’s not a great store to find eye-catching new products. To buy something on Amazon, first scour shopping blogs, Reddit comments, Wirecutter, and TikTok influencers to highlight the best finds. This is where Temu and the newest TikTok Store stand to shine. Chinese e-commerce retailers tend to be “discovery-driven, rather than research-driven,” says Canaves. Amazon has tried to incorporate some of the social aspects of TikTok shopping into its platform, including a scrolling feed of purchased products called Inspire, as well as live-streaming shopping, but these features haven’t made enough of a splash.
Amazon is far and away the largest e-commerce operation in the US, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to worry about other, much smaller retailers. “Taken cumulatively, new market entrants – Temu, TikTok Shop and Shein – ARE having an impact on sales,” says Canaves.
Over the past few decades, Amazon has become an unstoppable force. But maintaining its dominance as the Everything Store may be the biggest challenge facing the company now, according to Lowitz. Amazon sells everything, but can it do ultra-cheap fast fashion better than Shein? Better on furniture than Wayfair? Better in pet products than Chewy? Better on groceries than Walmart?
A competitor might not take much away from Amazon’s dominance, but taken all together, it adds. The evolution of Prime Day is an example of this—Amazon may have started it, but it’s now every retailer’s flagship month.