Shoppers spent a record $14.2 billion online this Prime Day

The news: Prime Day 2024 was Amazon’s biggest ever both in terms of sales and items sold, the retailer said, as shoppers took advantage of deals to stock up on back-to-school products, electronics, and other necessities.

• Total ecommerce spending across the two-day event reached a record $14.2 billion, an 11% increase year over year (YoY), per Adobe Analytics.
• The sale attracted “millions more Prime members” compared with 2023, according to Amazon, and drove “a record-breaking number of customers” to sign up for a Prime membership in the three weeks leading up to the event.

The underlying trends: As in 2023, consumers’ value-seeking tendencies were on full display, with customers opting for cheaper items and household essentials over big-ticket purchases.

• Almost two-thirds of items were sold for less than $20, with the average order size of $57.97 roughly in line with last year’s results, per Numerator. Top-selling items included Amazon’s Fire TV stick, Glad trash bags, and COSRX Snail Mucin Serum.
• Over half (53%) of Amazon Prime Day shoppers waited for the sale to purchase items, Numerator found. Roughly one-third (34%) used the event to stock up on products they typically buy from the retailer.
• Shoppers also took full advantage of flexible payment options: Buy now pay later accounted for 7.6% of online orders, or $1.08 billion of spending, an increase of 16.4% YoY, per Adobe.

Sellers push back: While Prime Day was a success from a spending standpoint, events leading up to and during the sale exposed the growing tensions between Amazon and its sellers.

• Amazon’s ad portal was down briefly on Tuesday evening, making it impossible for some sellers to access advertising dashboards and manage campaigns during one of the biggest sales days of the year.
• Some merchants found themselves pushed out of the all-important Buy Box in the weeks leading up to Prime Day after Amazon’s pricing algorithm picked up lower prices on Target due to the latter’s Circle Week sale—causing them to either lose revenues to resellers or slash prices at the expense of their already slim margins, per CNBC.
• While Amazon said independent sellers sold over 200 million items during Prime Day, a healthy chunk of those revenues are going straight back to the retailer in the form of advertising spend, logistics fees, and commission.

The big takeaway: Prime Day has become an established part of the retail calendar—which is both good news and bad news for Amazon.

• While the retailer still accounts for the majority of ecommerce sales during the event—59% this year, per our forecast—its share is slipping as competitors launch their own promotions and more consumers comparison-shop.
• 35% of Prime Day shoppers also shopped Walmart’s deals event, while 34% took part in Target’s Circle Week and 11% made a purchase during Best Buy’s Black Friday in July sale.

Still, the success of this year’s Prime Day underscores its importance as a customer acquisition tool, as well as its outsize impact on Amazon’s fast-growing ad business.