According to marketing analytics data from Jumpshot, when Amazon’s Prime Day kicked-off on Monday July 16 their daily sales conversion rate was just 4.5 percent higher than the previous Monday. On Tuesday July 17, however, after Amazon resolved many technical issues, the largest online retailer enjoyed a sales conversion rate 40 percent higher than the previous Tuesday, ultimately making Prime Day a success with over $4 billion in online sales. Despite website and checkout issues at launch Amazon saw a slight bump in conversion on the first (partial) day of their sale, but correcting these errors to led to an additional 35.5 percent increase in conversion the following day.
Shoppers expressed their frustration during the early-goings of Prime Day which began at 3pm Eastern on July 16. Server and technical issues impacted the desktop and mobile sites as well as the Amazon mobile app including error messages, broken links and issues adding items to shopping carts. While issues persisted for consumers that day, it seems the majority of the problems occurred in the first few hours after Prime Day kicked-off. Feedvisor, an online pricing software vendor, noted that marketplace sales during the first two hours of Prime Day 2018 were down two percent compared to last year. Amazon quickly recovered, however, as sales during the first 12 hours of Prime Day 2018 were up 89 percent compared to the first 12 hours of Prime Day 2017.
According to eMarketer, Amazon will capture 49.1 percent of all US retail eCommerce sales this year, and 5 percent of the US retail market. By comparison eBay, the second-largest US retail eCommerce merchant, represents 6.6 percent of the total US retail eCommerce market while Apple has 3.9 percent and Walmart has 3.7 percent. The ten largest eCommerce retailers are expected to compromise 70 percent of total eCommerce retail in 2018.
Forecasts from eMarketer call for Amazon’s US retail eCommerce sales to increase by 29 percent in 2018 while total US retail eCommerce will grow 16 percent from the previous year. More than 80 percent of the total growth in US eCommerce retail sales expected this year will be driven by Amazon.
These forecasts may be adjusted after Amazon had a larger-than-expected Prime Day overall, again despite the sales conversion and website difficulties early on. Prime Day started in 2015 with $0.9 billion in sales, and Internet Retailer estimates Prime Day 2018 to have totaled between $4.01 and $4.38 billion globally, including marketplace and direct sales.
Although this was Amazon’s largest Prime Day yet, up 66 percent in global sales from last year, Prime Day is still behind last year’s Cyber Monday ($6.59 billion) and Black Friday ($5.03 billion) in terms of total online sales. Still, these major online shopping days pale in comparison to Single’s Day (11/11) in 2017 when total online sales exceeded $25 billion.
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