Amazon Prime Day was Amazon’s Biggest Sales Day Ever

 

Two days ago, we shared Amazon’s announcement about Amazon Prime Day 2016 – the second such annual event exclusively for Amazon Prime members. Today, the company issued a press release about the 24 hour multi-country breaking all daily sales records.

How’s this for facts?

  • 90,000 TVs sold
  • Hundreds of thousands of Kindle tablets purchased
  • 200,000 headphones ordered
  • >1 million users accessing the Amazon smartphone app
  • More than double the sales volume of Amazon Prime Day 2015

Not bad for a company that just wanted to start an online book store 21 years ago. Yesterday was also Amazon’s 21st birthday. They started Prime Day to celebrate their second decade in business last year.

Amazon’s Prime membership itself has been one of the most lucrative business lines for the company. With an estimated 45 million members paying $99 for an annual membership or $131.88 a year paid monthly, that’s an easy $4.5 to $5 billion straight to the company’s top line.

Amazon has been very good at turning cost centers into profit-making units, and Prime is to retail what AWS is to technology. They did the same thing there – take their most expensive asset – technology – and rent out their extra capacity to generate cash, and it turned out that the business could ultimately bring in close to $10 billion a year.

In many ways Prime is one of the most successful loyalty programs on the planet, closely related to what Costco Wholesale and Sam’s Club are doing in the brick and mortar space. One of the reasons for Amazon’s growing revenues is that the average Prime member spends anywhere between $1200 and $1500 per year, compared to $500 for a non-Prime shopper.

From a retail perspective, Amazon Prime Day is a bigger coup than Black Friday. In fact the company prides itself on offering more deals than the famous shopping holiday.

With the success of this event being validated once again this year, Amazon is not likely to stop the deals coming. Around the world, they’re trying various deal types to entice more customers to their fold. And with an average of 73% of Prime free trial members signing up to the subscription thereafter, and a second year renewal rate of 91%, Amazon has every reason to make a fashion trend out of Prime Day and all its related deals.

Black Friday, anyone?