Amazon Prime Day Was Retail Giant’s Biggest Day Ever As Echo Family Shines

Prime Day Truck
Late Monday, Amazon kicked off its annual Prime Day celebration with 30 hours of deals aimed at providing its loyal subscribers with discounts on thousands of products. Well, the numbers are in, and Amazon says that this year’s Prime Day was its biggest to date, with sales growing 60 percent year-over-year.

According to Amazon, “tens of millions” of Prime members purchased at least one item during Prime Day. Although the online retail giant didn’t give a specific number for the subscribers that participated yesterday, it says that it increased 50 percent year-over-year.

In a show of strength for its Alexa-powered hardware family, there was a 7x increase in the number of Amazon Echo devices purchased this year than during Prime Day 2016. One deal in particular, which is complementary to the Echo, was on the TP-Link Smart Plug. Although Amazon doesn’t specially mention this, a glitch in its ordering system brought the [already enticing] $19.99 Prime Day price for the Smart Plug down to just $8.03 before tax for many customers. Needless to say, U.S. Prime members snapped up over 50,000 of the TP-Link Smart Plugs during Prime Day.

echo dot 1

However, the best-selling device during Prime Day was the Echo Dot, which was discounted from $50 to $35. Amazon says that the Echo Dot “was not only the best-selling Amazon device this Prime Day, but also the best-selling product from any manufacturer in any category across Amazon globally.” The original Amazon Echo was also discounted by 50 percent during Prime Day, taking its price to just $89.99.

Other top deals around the globe during Prime Day included:

  • U.S.: Instant Pot DUO80 7-in-1 Multi-Use Programmable Pressure Cooker; 23andMe DNA Tests for Health + Ancestry
  • U.K.: TP-Link Wi-Fi Smart Plug, works with Alexa; Sony Playstation 4
  • Spain: SanDisk Ultra Fit 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive; Moto G Plus (5th Generation) Smartphone; Lenovo Ideapad 310 Laptop
  • Mexico: AmazonBasics Apple Certified Lightning to USB Cable; Nintendo Switch
  • Japan: SAVAS Whey Protein; Happy Belly pure bottled water
  • Italy: Finish All in One Max tablets; Caffe Vergnano 1882 Espresso machine
  • India: OnePlus 5 phone; Seagate Expansion 1.5TB Portable External Drive
  • Germany and Austria: PlayStation Plus Membership; Soda Stream
  • France and Belgium: PlayStation Plus Membership; Game of Thrones - The Complete Season 1 to 6 Blu-Ray
  • China: Fisher Price Soothe and Glow Seahorse; A brief history of humankind+ A brief history of tomorrow set
  • Canada: Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1 Multi-Use Programmable Pressure Cooker, 8 Qt; AmazonBasics AA Rechargeable Batteries (8-Pack)

“To those customers who tried Prime for the first time and our long time members, thank you for a great Prime Day,” said Greg Greeley, Vice President, Amazon Prime. “Our teams around the world will keep working to add more and more to your membership, so Prime continues to make your life better every day. We are already looking forward to our Prime Day celebration next year.”

prime now

Amazon also took the time to highlight the efficiency of its ultra-fast Prime Now delivery service. The fastest Prime Day deliveries using Prime Now occurred within just 12 minutes. For reference, Prime members in a supported geographic region can typically receive an order within one hour if they pay $7.99 or pay no additional shipping fee and receive it within two hours.

Given the rapid grow from year to year, we expect Prime Day 2018 will be even more fruitful for Amazon.