Will Amazon Dethrone Black Friday?
Everyone loves a sale, but will a day of Amazon sales celebrating their 20th anniversary truly dethrone Black Friday? Probably not, but it might come close.
Amazon, in true Amazon fashion, will be celebrating its second decade of business with Prime Day. Prime Day will occur for 24 hours beginning at midnight ET of July 15th. Amazon boasts that there will be more sales in this one day than Black Friday.
Deals will be cycling very quickly, some as fast as every ten minutes. These sales will only be available to Amazon Prime members, which if you are not currently one, you can sign up for a 30-day trial in order to take advantage of the sale. Statistics say that Amazon Prime members spend over twice as much annually on Amazon and this is a great way to reward their membership base and celebrate their 20th year of business.
To us, it sounds like a phenomenal way to not only make a huge splash of attention but also to greatly increase their Amazon Prime membership.
Already there is a lot of hype and buzz about this day, not only making people aware of the sale, but also of the concept of Amazon Prime. For something that everyone in this office has, a stunning amount of consumers in the world are either unaware of or do not participate in Amazon Prime.
This awareness is fantastic because it will entice a great deal of new members to join, not only due to the deals but because everyone loves free two-day shipping. Not only will Amazon then profit by a great deal of new annual membership fees, but with an annual increase in spending by members of Amazon Prime, Amazon itself makes more money off of the percentage taken from the vendors. By the same token, more vendors will want to be part of the Amazon Prime program which requires a monthly fee from them to Amazon.
There is also the forgetful factor that will profit Amazon. A lot of people will take advantage of the trial of Amazon Prime and then forget to cancel it. Amazon will then charge them for the full membership, making a small profit there and then hopefully have a conscripted member for the next year that takes advantage of their forgetfulness and spends more on Amazon.
It sounds like a win, win, win for Amazon. This looks to be a great move from a marketing, sales and PR stance that will make for a very intense 24 hours next week. It will be interesting to see if their numbers will approach that of Black Friday or even Cyber Monday. Hopefully their servers will be able to handle the traffic that they are sure to receive.
Will you be spending time and money on Amazon next week?
