e-comm

Prime Day 2021 was Amazon’s biggest sales event yet

This Prime Day, third-party sellers outpaced Amazon itself.
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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

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.