The tech and retail giant said orders surpassed last year’s event by more than 50 percent in the U.S. and more than 60 percent worldwide. “After yesterday’s results, we’ll definitely be doing this again,” said Amazon executive Greg Greeley.
Amazon.com called the second incarnation of Prime Day its “biggest day ever,” as millions of shoppers flocked to scoop up the discounted wares sold on the site, a sign the company’s self-proclaimed retail holiday might become a tradition.
“After yesterday’s results, we’ll definitely be doing this again,” said Greg Greeley, Amazon Prime vice president, in a statement Wednesday.
There were reports of technical hiccups shortly after the start of the blowout sale, which experts said could have slowed down matters some.
As late as 5 p.m. Tuesday, ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce advisory firm for merchants selling on Amazon and other marketplaces, said sales for third-party sellers were in line with what had been seen last year, at least in the U.S.
But on Wednesday, Amazon said orders surpassed last year’s Prime Day event by more than 50 percent in the U.S. and more than 60 percent around the globe.
That means this year Amazon’s loot could be even bigger than the $400 million in extra revenue that analysts with JPMorgan estimated Amazon collected in the previous Prime Day.
More important, because you must be a Prime member to participate in the retail holiday, it means that the loyalty program has been growing. That’s good for the company because Prime members spend far more with the company than nonmembers. JPMorgan estimates there are more than 55 million Prime members worldwide.
Tom Caporaso, the CEO of Clarus Commerce, an e-commerce company, said that from his perch the latest Prime Day seemed to be great improvement over the first edition.
“Last year people were talking about a glorified yard sale, and inventory was low,” he said. “I think Amazon answered a lot of those concerns.”
The Seattle tech and retail giant said it sold more of its own devices in the U.S. than in any other day in its history. It sold more than 2½ times more Echo voice-activated speakers than in the previous highest-selling day, and three times more Amazon devices than in the previous Prime Day.
The best-selling Amazon device around the world was the Fire TV Stick, the company said.
Shoppers globally bought more than 2 million toys, 1 million pairs of shoes, 90,000 TVs and hundreds of thousands of Kindle e-readers, Amazon said. Mobile orders surpassed last year’s event by a factor of two.
Small businesses using the Amazon platform, an increasingly important constituency for the company’s bottom line, saw their orders triple vs. last year’s event, Amazon said.
In Spain, Amazon sold more than 570,000 units, more than on the previous Black Friday. Among the most popular were SanDisk memory sticks and cards and Kindle Paperwhite e-readers. Italy set a record with 750,000 products ordered; Germany saw 7 million products sold, more than the previous holiday season record of 5.4 million.
Brisk sales may have resulted in depleted stocks and some delays. Some Echo speakers ordered won’t be delivered until late July, despite the two-day shipping promise.
On Wednesday, Amazon said on its website that the Echo won’t be in stock until July 27. Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.