Amazon Prime Day event starts, sales up 12% in first 7 hours: Report

Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Day sales rose almost 12 per cent in the first seven hours of the event compared with the same period last year, according to Momentum Commerce, which manages 50 brands in a variety of product categories.
 

The early result points to a strong Prime Day performance, according to the firm, because sales during the 2023 event peaked in the first several hours. Momentum, which manages Amazon sales on behalf of brands like Crocs, Lego and Beats by Dre, generates about $7 billion in sales annually on Amazon, giving it a large sample to assess Prime Day’s performance.

 

“Consumers continue to spend, but they do so strategically, which can benefit a sale like Prime Day,” said Sky Canaves, an analyst at EMarketer Inc. “I think we’ll see shoppers buy things like headphones and chargers rather than big-ticket electronics like laptops.”

The average household spent about $100 on Prime Day purchases as of noon New York time, according to Numerator, which tracked more than 2,000 orders from more than 1,200 households. The top-selling items included protein shakes, the Amazon Fire TV stick streaming device, sunscreen and Amazon’s Happy Belly brand grocery items, according to Numerator, a market research firm that tracks Amazon sales by sampling households.

Amazon launched Prime Day in 2015 to attract new subscribers, who pay $139 a year for shipping discounts, video streaming and other benefits. The event helps the company lock in shoppers before the holidays and deepen its relationship with existing customers by offering them exclusive deals on gadgets and other products. About 180 million people in the US had Prime memberships as of March, up 8 per cent from a year earlier, according to market research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Prime Day can serve as a bellwether for the holiday shopping season. Adobe Inc. estimated online sales across all retailers will total $14 billion over the two-day event, up almost 11 per cent from last year. EMarketer gave a more muted estimate of 6 per cent growth to $13.8 billion in US online spending during the Prime Day sale, with direct sales on Amazon up 5.5 per cent to $8.2 billion.

US Senator Bernie Sanders, a frequent Amazon critic, released a preliminary report timed to Prime Day claiming that the surge in business during the sale makes it more likely Amazon workers will be injured filling orders. Amazon is also fighting allegations from the federal government and its home state of Washington that it exposes workers to injury risks.

“Prime Day and the holiday season are characterized by extremely high volume and intense pressure to work long hours and ignore safety guidelines,” according to report, which was released Monday and is based on interviews with more than 100 Amazon workers around the US.

Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said the report “draws sweeping and inaccurate conclusions based on unverified anecdotes, and it misrepresents documents that are several years old and contained factual errors and faulty analysis