Amazon just had its biggest sales day ever — here's why it really matters (AMZN)

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Amazon saw its highest number of orders on this year's Prime Day, making it the biggest sales day in company history.

Sales volume jumped 60% from last year's Prime Day, and some reports estimate this year's event could reach $1 billion in single-day sales.

But the real benefit of Prime Day, which was Tuesday, may not be measurable in simple dollar figures. Here's why it really matters to Amazon:

It sold more Amazon devices than ever. Amazon saw the biggest day ever for Amazon devices after heavily promoting them all day and offering discounts of over 30% on most of the devices. That's important because selling more Amazon devices helps the company further deepen its engagement with consumers.

“Amazon continues to use device promotions around key shopping events (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, among others), we believe in an effort to further its strategy of offering low-cost devices to further embed the consumer in the Amazon ecosystem,” KeyBank Capital Markets wrote in a note.

Growth in number of Prime users and third party sales: Amazon requires you to be a Prime member to make any purchases on Prime Day. That helps Amazon increase the number of Prime members, who tend to spend more than non-Prime members on its site. Mizuho Securities estimates this year's Prime Day to have added "a few hundred thousand" new Prime members.

Although some data suggest third party sellers, or people who sell their products on Amazon's site, saw roughly flat sales growth, Amazon says they saw orders nearly triple compared to last year's Prime Day. If that's the case, more third party sellers will join Amazon's marketplace, which only helps grow its overall ecosystem.

Solidify Prime Day as one of the biggest shopping holidays: This year's Prime Day set new records across the board, firmly establishing itself as one of the biggest shopping holidays in the world, the way Black Friday or Cyber Monday works. Amazon has already said they will bring back Prime Day again next year.

"Given the outsized performance of Prime Day 2016, we believe that Prime Day is now solidified as an annualized shopping holiday for consumers," Piper Jaffray wrote in a note.

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