Yesterday was Amazon’s big Prime Day shopping event, for which tons of deals and discounts were promised all day. Since it was such a big shopping day that has never been seen before, I put together a few lessons I took away from this experiment.
1. Referencing Black Friday Automatically Gets People Excited
The term “Black Friday” instills happy feelings of unbelievable savings! To hear that a sale is going to be “as good as” or “bigger than” Black Friday, people immediately want to make sure they don’t miss out.
Since Amazon sells so many different things, the site caters to anyone. This means the masses were interested in what was being sold and also didn’t want to miss out on major savings.
= Recipe for success.
2. You Don’t Need to Actually Deliver to Still Get the Increased Sales
At the end of the day, the hype of Prime Day brought a lot of traffic to the site – meaning it got people into a shopping mood as they took time out of their day to check out what was available. However many people were very disappointed at what was being offered. The kinds of deals available were things most people didn’t really care that much about. In fact, many consumers were complaining about their disappointment on social media.
So avid online shoppers like myself went past the homepage Prime Day deals and continued searching for other things hoping to see that they would also be on sale. People then start putting things in their cart that they know they want to buy regardless of whether or not they’re on sale.
Shopping carts quickly filled up as these people started going into a shopping frenzy. They ended up buying things that weren’t even on sale just because they took the time to check out the website and found things they didn’t mind paying full price for. Amazon still gets the sales but the consumer doesn’t take advantage of any spectacular deals.
Amazon for the win.
3. The Largest Online Store in Existence Pulls All the Strings
Let’s face it. Amazon just created a new big shopping day. First it was Black Friday, then Cyber Monday and Green Monday… Are large retailers going to be adding a “Prime Day” to their marketing calendars next year?
Walmart already jumped on by offering its own sales that day to compete with what Amazon was doing. I’m sure they both saw huge spikes in revenue because of it. So what are they going to do next year? Both of these companies have revenue goals they need to hit every year. Are they just going to do things as usual next year when they have a huge July number to hit in order to outperform last year’s numbers? Doubtful. I predict another big day next year. Even if it isn’t called Prime Day, I can imagine us seeing something similar happen again this time next year…
Image credit: Evan Lorne / Shutterstock.com
3 Things I Learned From Amazon’s Prime Day
by Kelsey Cadogan on July 16th, 2015 | ~ minute read
