Did you enjoy Target’s Circle Week last week? Or Walmart’s July deals? TikTok Shop just rolled out its Deals For You Days from July 9-11, while Temu Week, which runs through July 18, is slashing prices by up to 90%. This week, Amazon Prime Day is upon us. This all comes on the heels of retailers’ Fourth of July sales, turning the entire month into a blur of bargains. It’s time to get shopping, because it’s never too late to shop.
None of this is an accident. Just like when major retailers suddenly announced they were finally cutting grocery prices to combat inflation, it’s time to react to what the competition is doing. July has become the month of bargains, because no store wants to be the one selling an air purifier at full price when Amazon has it 25% off.
Amazon’s Prime Day sale is, in many ways, a testament to the e-commerce giant’s power: It invented a new holiday, now held twice a year, that consumers flock to every summer and fall to observe. It’s still the season’s flagship sales event, with a Megan Thee Stallion ad featuring her rapping about her love of Prime Day, but competitors are increasingly trying to steal its thunder, and it’s working. A new report from market research firm eMarketer predicts that for the third year in a row, Amazon’s share of all online purchases made between July 16 and 17, when its Prime Day sale takes place, will decline. That’s a testament to how successful other retailers are at luring customers into their stores. Prime Day is still a blockbuster 48-hour sales period, but not just for Amazon.
The first Prime Day took place on July 15, 2015, Amazon’s 20th anniversary, and was billed as bigger than Black Friday. It was a clever marketing ploy: instead of simply competing during established holiday sales periods, Amazon created its own moment in the middle of summer (Walmart immediately announced its own July sale that same summer).
Prime Day was also an opportunity to promote the Prime membership, which 40 million people had signed up for in 2015, according to the market research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP). Today, CIRP estimates that there are about 180 million Prime members in the United States, or just over half the country’s total population. This nation of loyal Prime members has helped transform Amazon from a textbook example of an unprofitable tech company into a behemoth. In the first quarter of 2024, the company posted net income of $10.4 billion.
The original Prime Day deals were apparently a bit of a letdown compared to the hype — they promoted a lot of Fire TV Sticks, always a Prime Day staple — but Amazon still sold about $900 million worth of products that day. Since then, consumers have given Amazon billions and billions more dollars during Prime Days, hitting a record $12.7 billion over 48 hours last July.
“I think Amazon is largely sticking to its tried-and-true Prime Day strategy this year,” says Sky Canaves, principal analyst at eMarketer. That means it’s offering great deals that, in turn, are driving more Prime signups. Some of this year’s biggest discounts are invite-only deals from big brands that only Prime members can request access to: The Peloton bike is 30% off, while a pair of Sony headphones are 55% off, and a Citizen chronograph watch is getting a pretty steep 60% off.
You can also expect plenty of beauty products to be on sale. “Amazon has more premium brands this year, especially in categories like beauty,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at consultancy GlobalData. Clinique, for example, just became available on Amazon, joining the ranks of popular beauty brands like Dermalogica and Laneige that are already on the platform.
When there are always sales, are there never sales?
With Prime Day, Amazon has introduced a new event into the lives of American consumers. The problem is that when everyone else is having sales in mid-July, those sales lose some of their luster.
“Prime Day used to be bigger,” says Michael Levin, a co-founder of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. “People have gotten a little more used to it,” he says, both because Amazon added a second Prime Day event in October starting in 2022 and because all the competitors have started to follow the Prime Day model. “I think the excitement has faded overall,” adds Josh Lowitz, a co-founder of CIRP.
The fact that Prime Day sales growth has slowed significantly may be a reflection of this acclimation. Last year, Prime Day revenue was 6.7% higher than in 2022, and continues to grow, albeit slowly. But in 2018, the sales event generated 78% more revenue than the previous year, according to a report from Capital One Shopping. Google Trends data also shows that searches for “Prime Day” peaked around July 2018.
Amazon is partly to blame for the dimming of Prime Day’s fervor. Not only are there now multiple Prime Days per year, but the company also held a large spring sale event open to all customers, not just Prime members, and also held smaller, more category-specific sales. “These additional sales can have a slight dampening effect on Prime Day,” Canaves says.
Amazon probably doesn’t mind, as more frequent sales allow it to take advantage of smaller, more frequent purchases on its site, whether it’s beauty products or supplements, which come with a convenient auto-replenishment shopping option. As of this writing, it’s not Prime Day yet, but Amazon already has plenty of “early” Prime Day deals, further blurring the line between when a sale begins and when it ends. Even outside of major sales, products on Amazon are often on sale, with their prices fluctuating millions of times per day. The Le Creuset Dutch Oven in Cherry is currently on sale for $297 instead of $460, and it’s not marked as a Prime Day deal. Online sites like Camelcamelcamel or Keepa make it super easy to set up a price drop alert that you can set and forget rather than waiting for a sale event to launch. According to Keepa, these Levi’s jeans see an average of six price drops per month, a Coway air purifier about eight times per month, and Premier protein shakes, a best-seller on Prime Day October 2023, 32 times per month. If you miss out on a good deal, don’t worry. Just wait a few minutes.
Everyone is an Amazon competitor
Online retailers have been coming out in force to offer their answer to Prime Day, and Amazon is clearly paying attention to the newcomers hot on its heels. The Information recently reported that the American e-commerce giant is launching a cheaper clothing and homeware section with slow shipping direct from China, similar to Temu.
Amazon has long been synonymous with convenience: You can buy items with a click and have them delivered, sometimes the same day. It makes sense to offer customers a new slow shipping option if they want it, but it’s also a partial capitulation by Amazon that could potentially cause consumers to lose trust. don’t do it In fact, everything needs super-fast shipping. Price is king, and Chinese e-commerce companies like Temu that are making inroads in the US have an advantage here. Whether you shop on Amazon or Temu, everything you buy probably comes from a Chinese seller anyway.
Amazon’s competitors have another advantage: making shopping fun. “We like to say that Amazon is a better place to buy stuff than to buy stuff,” says CIRP’s Lowitz. “If you know what you want, Amazon is a fantastic place to buy. It’s easy, it’s reliable.” It’s not a great place to find new products that catch your eye. To buy something on Amazon, you first have to scour shopping blogs, Reddit reviews, Wirecutter, and TikTok influencers to surface the best finds. That’s where Temu and the new TikTok Shop are coming into their own. Chinese e-commerce retailers tend to be “very discovery-driven, rather than search-driven,” says Canaves. Amazon has tried to integrate some of TikTok’s social shopping aspects into its platform, including a scrolling feed of shoppable products called Inspire, as well as live shopping, but those features haven’t really caught on.
Amazon is by far the largest e-commerce company in the United States, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t worry about other, much smaller retailers. “Taken cumulatively, the new entrants to the market — Temu, TikTok Shop, and Shein — are “It has an impact on sales,” Canaves says.
Over the past few decades, Amazon has become an unstoppable force. But maintaining its dominance as the one-stop-shop may be the biggest challenge the company faces today, according to Lowitz. Amazon sells everything, but can it do better than Shein at ultra-low-cost fast fashion? Better than Wayfair at furniture? Better than Chewy at pet supplies? Better than Walmart at groceries?
No single competitor can really chip away at Amazon’s dominance, but together they represent an asset. The evolution of Prime Day is a case in point: Amazon may have started the movement, but now it’s every retailer’s Prime month.