Amazon Prime Day is a day where you can find the best deals online so customers do not need to wait for the official holiday shopping season to begin as they have a summer shopping day to enjoy. The competition that Amazon faces is from other established brick and mortar retailers and their online sites.
Walmart (WMT), which is the biggest competitor matched up against Amazon, is marketing great deals on TVs; even better deals than the ones offered on Black Friday. There are other big stores that are planning on the same marketing strategy as Walmart. Macy´s plans to advertise its “Black Friday in July” on its website. Another store is Target, which is promoting a 25% discount on home articles and is also reducing by as much as 50% the prices assorted toys. Kohl´s also has discounts of more than 70% during its “clearance sale.”
July 16 is the third anniversary of Amazon Prime Day. It has been estimated by analysts that sales during this special one-day extravaganza exceeded $1 billion in 2017. It is expected that sales will exceed that amount in 2018.
Retailers such as Macy’s, Target, Walmart, and Best Buy have not commented about their plans for Prime Day, while Kohl’s denied they were doing anything special for the day.
Wall Street is keeping a keen eye on everything that will happen during Prime Day, since it is a strong indicator of how customers will shop during back-to-school season and the Christmas holiday season, which are two shopping seasons in which retailers make large amount of both sales and profit for the full year.
Amazon also offered new deals leading up to Prime Day. Amazon gave away $10 for every $10 spent by Prime Members, a deal between July 11 and July 17 at its Whole Foods markets. Prime Day 2017 for Amazon outsold its Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
At the start of 2018, Amazon released information about the number of Prime members it has, which it said exceeded 100 million.
Amazon has always said that its Prime members spend more than its other shoppers, and because of that, competitors are attempting to entice some of those shoppers to their sites and grab a portion of the money spend on this huge online shopping day.
