Prime Day isn’t just for Amazon anymore

Did you enjoy Target Circle Week last week? Or Walmart’s July deals? TikTok Shop just had its Deals For You Days from July 9 through 11, while Temu Week, running through July 18, slashes prices by up to 90 percent. Now, this week, Amazon Prime Day is upon us. All this comes not a moment after retailers’ July Fourth holiday sales, turning the entire month into a blur of bargains. It’s time to shop because it’s never not time to shop.

None of this is an accident. Much like when big-box retailers suddenly announced they were finally lowering grocery prices to combat inflation, it’s business strategy 101 to react to what the competition is doing. July has become a season for Big Blowout Deals because no store wants to be the one selling an air purifier at full price when Amazon has it for 25 percent off.

Amazon’s famous Prime Day sale is, in many ways, proof of the e-commerce giant’s sheer power: It invented a new holiday — now happening twice a year — that consumers have come to observe every summer and fall. It’s still the marquee sales event of the season, complete with a Megan Thee Stallion ad in which she raps about how much she loves Prime, but competitors are trying harder and harder to steal some of its spotlight — and it’s been working. A new report from market research firm eMarketer forecasts 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 is taking place, will shrink. This speaks to other retailers’ success in pulling customers to their storefronts instead. Prime Day is still a blockbuster 48-hour period of sales — but not just for Amazon anymore.

Prime Day then and now

The inaugural Prime Day was a one-day sale on July 15, 2015, pegged to Amazon’s 20th anniversary and billed as bigger than Black Friday. It was a clever marketing maneuver — instead of competing only during already-established holiday sale seasons, Amazon carved out its own moment smack dab in the middle of the summer. (Walmart immediately announced its own July sale that same summer).

Prime Day was also a big billboard for a Prime subscription, which 40 million people had signed up for by 2015, according to the market research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP). Today, CIRP estimates, there are about 180 million Prime members in the US, which is a little more than half the total population of the country. This nation of loyal Prime subscribers helped make Amazon, for many years a textbook case of an unprofitable tech company, into a juggernaut. In the first quarter of 2024, the company netted a profit of $10.4 billion. 

The original Prime Day deals were apparently something of a disappointment compared to the hype — it pushed a lot of Fire TV Sticks, still a Prime Day staple — but nevertheless Amazon sold about $900 million worth of stuff that day. Since then, consumers have been giving Amazon ever-increasing billions on Prime Days, hitting a record of $12.7 billion over 48 hours last July.

“I think Amazon this year is largely sticking to its tried-and-tested Prime Day playbook,” says Sky Canaves, a principal analyst at eMarketer. That means offering good deals that, in turn, drive more Prime sign-ups. Some of the biggest discounts this year are invite-only deals from big brands that only Prime members can request access to: The Peloton bike is 30 percent off, while a pair of Sony headphones is 55 percent off, and a Citizen chronograph watch is discounted by a pretty massive 60 percent.

You can also expect a lot of beauty products to go on sale. “Amazon has got more premium brands involved this year, especially in categories like beauty,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at the consulting firm GlobalData. Clinique, for example, just recently became available on Amazon, joining the ranks of popular beauty brands like Dermalogica and Laneige already on the platform.

When there’s always a sale, is there ever a sale?

With Prime Day, Amazon introduced a new calendar event into the lives of American consumers. The problem is that when everyone’s throwing a sale sometime in mid-July, those sales lose some luster.

Prime Day “used to be bigger,” says Michael Levin, one of the cofounders of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. “People got a little more acclimated to it,” he says, both because Amazon added a second Prime Day event in October starting in 2022 and because every competitor started following the Prime Day playbook. “I think that the excitement has worn off overall,” adds CIRP cofounder Josh Lowitz.

The fact that Prime Day sales growth has slowed way down may be a reflection of that acclimation. Last year’s Prime Day revenue was 6.7 percent higher than it was in 2022 — still growing, though slowly. But in 2018, the sales event brought in a whopping 78 percent more revenue than it did the year before, according to a Capital One Shopping report. Google Trends data also shows that searches for “Prime Day” peaked around July 2018. 

Amazon itself is partly to blame for dulling some of the Prime Day fervor. Not only are there multiple Prime Days per year now but it also held a major spring sales event that was open to all customers, not just Prime members, and has been doing smaller, more category-specific sales, too. “These incremental sales can have some minor dampening effect on Prime Day,” says Canaves. 

Amazon probably doesn’t mind too much, though, because having more frequent sales means it can take advantage of smaller but more frequent purchases on its site, whether of beauty products or health supplements, which come with a handy auto-replenish purchase option. At time of writing, it’s not actually Prime Day yet, but Amazon already has plenty of “early” Prime Day deals available, too, further smudging the line of when the sale really kicks off and ends. Even outside of the big sales, products on Amazon are often discounted, its prices fluctuating millions of times per day. The Le Creuset Dutch Oven in Cerise 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 trivially easy to set up an alert for price drops that you can set and forget rather than waiting for a sales event to launch. According to Keepa, these Levi jeans see an average of six price drops per month, a Coway air purifier about eight times per month, and the Premier Protein Shakes — a bestseller during the October 2023 Prime Day — a dizzying 32 times per month. If you miss a good price, don’t worry. Just wait a few minutes. 

Everyone’s an Amazon competitor

Online retailers have come out in full force to offer their answer to Prime Day — and Amazon is clearly paying attention to the upstarts nipping at its heels. The Information recently reported that the American e-commerce giant is launching a cheaper apparel and home goods section with slow shipping directly from China, much in the same way Temu does business.

Amazon has so long been synonymous with convenience: You can buy things with one click to be delivered, sometimes the very same day. It makes sense to offer customers a new slow shipping option if they want it, but it’s also a partial capitulation from Amazon that maybe consumers don’t actually need lightning fast delivery for everything. Price is king, and the Chinese e-commerce companies like Temu making inroads in the US have an edge here. Whether you’re shopping on Amazon or Temu, whatever you buy is likely coming from a Chinese seller anyway.

Another area where Amazon’s competitors have an advantage: making shopping entertaining. “We like to say that Amazon is a better place to buy things than to shop for things,” 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 such a great store for coming across new products that catch the eye. To buy something on Amazon, first you hit up the shopping blogs, Reddit comments, Wirecutter, and TikTok influencers to surface the best finds. This is where Temu and the newer TikTok Shop stand to excel. Chinese e-commerce retailers tend to be “very discovery-driven, rather than search-driven,” says Canaves. Amazon has tried to incorporate some of TikTok’s social shopping aspects into its platform, including a scrolling feed of shoppable products called Inspire, as well as livestream shopping, but these features haven’t quite made waves.

Amazon is far and away the biggest e-commerce operation in the US, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be concerned about other much smaller retailers. “Taken cumulatively, the new entrants in the market — Temu, TikTok Shop, and Shein — are having an impact on sales,” says Canaves. 

Over the last few decades, Amazon has become an unstoppable force. But maintaining its dominance as the Everything Store might be the greatest challenge the company faces now, according to Lowitz. Amazon sells everything, but can it do better in ultra-cheap fast fashion than Shein? Better in furniture than Wayfair? Better in pet products than Chewy? Better in groceries than Walmart?

One competitor may not chip away much at Amazon’s dominance, but taken all together, it adds up. The evolution of Prime Day is one example of that — Amazon may have kicked it off, but now it’s every retailer’s Prime Month.