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.
Google the “Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro” this week and you’ll notice that the stainless steel kitchen gadget with algorithmically enhanced heating is the same price at Best Buy, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, and PC Richard: $299.95, or 25% off the list price, which is the same deal Amazon is offering during its two-day Prime Day sales event.
Kirthi Kalyanam, professor and executive director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University, told Retail Brew that this kind of price matching is becoming more common around Prime Day, and it could eventually make it harder for the e-commerce giant’s deals to stand out during the summer sales season that it helped create.
“What I think is going to happen is Amazon will need to work harder and harder at making sure that customers are indeed excited,” he said. “Traffic can go up, but the question is…how much customers believe those deals are really great deals, and Amazon’s going to have to work harder at that, only because everybody else has something going on.”
- Recently, big box rivals such as Walmart and Target have held weeklong sales events, while TikTok announced its “Deals For You Days” featuring discounts from a number of major brands that sell through the social media platform.
- The competitive pressure is also inflating discount rates. According to Adobe Analytics, markdowns in a number of categories are nearly double what they were last year.
Competing on price: Kalyanam explained that these developments mark an evolution in the purpose of Prime Day, whose focus is shifting from advertising the benefits of Amazon Prime and growing its membership base to competing on price with major rivals.
“Everybody now knows Prime. Everybody knows what it does, and those things are not relevant anymore,” he said. “So it’s really about continuing to let people know that Amazon is a great destination for low prices in spite of the variety of competition that’s out there.”