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Despite accusations of poor deals, Amazon’s Prime Day promotion proved the haters wrong and out-sold the retailer’s best Black Friday event.
The sale, which was only available to subscribers of Amazon’s eponymous 79/year service (which provides free next-day delivery and instant video streaming among other benefits), ran for just one day – July 15th.
Like its Black Friday sales, price cuts were limited by both time and stock levels, but offered potential drops of up to 80 and 90 per cent across all of Amazon’s product categories.
Some shoppers were displeased with the exclusive deals presented throughout the day, taking to social media with the hashtag #PrimeDayFail to express their displeasure and mock deals on seemingly mundane items (cat litter, anyone?).
Despite this, Amazon has now revealed that more items were sold during Prime Day than during its previous best-ever Black Friday sale in 2014. 34.4 million items were purchased – almost a fifth (18 per cent) more than last year’s Black Friday.
The impressive total equates to around 398 items every second. Overall, global Amazon sales almost trebled (up 266 per cent) compared to the same date last year.
The best-selling item list broken down by country makes for amusing reading; the UK opted for the Lenovo Flex 10 10.1-inch Multimode Touchscreen Notebook as its favourite item – a rather straightforward choice – while Japan enjoyed the Green Smoothie Mix, both Germany and Austria prepared for summer with Croc Sandals, France cashed in for the board game Monopoly and Canada contained its excitement in Huggies Diapers. Meanwhile, the US found its precious in the Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy.
Surprise, surprise, Amazon also confirmed that Prime Day would become an annual celebration, returning in 2016.
"Going into this, we weren’t sure whether Prime Day would be a one-time thing or if it would become an annual event," the retailer said in a statement.
"After yesterday’s results, we’ll definitely be doing this again."
Here are a few stats from the US side of the sale:
- Tens of thousands of Fire TV Sticks were purchased in a single hour, crowning it as the fastest-selling deal on an Amazon device to date
- 56,000Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogysets were sold
- 47,000 TVs were sold – a 1,300 per cent boom year-on-year
- 28,000 Rubbermaid 42-Piece Easy Find Lid Food Storage Sets were purchased, compared to a relatively measly 428 the Wednesday before
- Similarly, 24,000 Instant Pot 7-in-1 Programmable Pressure Cookers were brought, versus 182 the previous Wednesday
- And 14,000 iRobot Roomba 595 Pet Vacuum Cleaning Robots cleaned up the sale, compared to just a single sale the Wednesday before
- 12,000copies of Fifty Shades of Grey Unrated Editionwere sold on Blu-ray – almost ten times the 121 shifted the previous Wednesday
