Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
Well, folks, we survived another Prime Day.
Did we *need* a new waffle maker? No. But it was 50% off...and that’s how we explain Amazon selling 250+ million items to Prime members worldwide this week.
Record-keeping: E-comm sales in the US exceeded $11 billion during Prime Day 2021—the biggest one yet—per Adobe Analytics data, and up 6.1% YoY. But according to Numerator, American shoppers spent less per order than in the previous two years.
- The average Amazon order was $47.14 for the first 32 hours of the sales event, down from $54.64 in 2020 and $58.91 in 2019.
Chalk it up to the pandemic: “We've become more trigger happy with smaller e-commerce orders,” Holden Bale, group vice president and head of commerce at Huge, told Retail Brew. “This behavior was reinforced by Covid: rushing to get a delivery slot...refreshing to see inventory constantly disappearing.”
Prime time for…Amazon’s third-party sellers. They had their “biggest two-day period ever,” the e-comm giant said in a statement—and even outpaced Amazon’s own retail biz.
- 🧐 that no specific numbers were shared, but we do know third-party sales topped $3.5 billion during Prime Day 2020.
Now what? Between Memorial Day, Prime Day and July 4 around the corner, the discounts are nonstop—and shoppers know it.
- “It's going to be even more important [for retailers to] make these sales events interesting and viable,” Adobe’s Senior Digital Insights Manager Vivek Pandya told Retail Brew.
“As a retailer, you have to make a real decision about whether you want to switch to an 'always-on' promotional model [or] whether you want to stick to one major window,” Bale noted.—JG