Amazon Early Access Prime Day: Muted Start to Holiday Season

Meh? Maybe the best word to describe Prime Day this year.

The returns are in (?) on this year's Prime Day, and even by Amazon's own language, you get the reason they were pretty much forced this year to have another Prime Day prior to holiday:

Too much inventory, diminished traffic, not enough sell-through.

July: "Biggest Prime Day Event Ever"

October: "Tens of Millions Prime Members Shopped"

Amazon has over 200 million Prime Members. Most seemed to regard it as a non-event? Tens of millions in PR-speak (something Amazon famously avoids) could mean 21 million. It could mean 90 million, but you guess which one it is closer to.

July: "300 million items sold"

October: "100 million items from our selling partners"

Remember third-party sellers are 57% of Amazon's unit volume.

Does this mean total 157 million items sold? Half as big from an item throughput point of view?

July: "Best selling categories were Electronics and Consumer Devices"

(this matches Amazon's normal patterns)

October: "Best selling categories were apparel"

(this sounds like cleaning out the warehouse)

July: "Prime Members saved over $1.7 billion"

October: 🦗🦗

July: "100,000 items purchased per minute at peak"

October: "Holiday shopping on Amazon is just getting started."

The fact that Amazon is struggling to project strength in this announcement tells you something quickly for the holidays:

Make your promotions relevant and significant if you want to break through this holiday.

Otherwise, you too will be faced with "meh" instead of "Wow!"