Prime Day Expected To Lift US eCommerce Spend Past $2B

Amazon’s impact from Prime Day this year will again lift the U.S. eCommerce market, according to a report by TechCrunch. 

Adobe Digital Insights (ADI) predicts that top retailers who have more than $1 billion in online sales will have a revenue lift of 79 percent, which is higher than the 60 percent from a year prior. 

The research also predicts that Prime Day is going to be the third time eCommerce spending goes over $2 billion on a day that’s not a holiday; the other two days were Labor Day in 2018 and Memorial Day in 2019. 

“We attribute this growth in sales to the fact that the big eCommerce competitors have become better at reaping the benefits of this artificial holiday,” said Taylor Schreiner, principal analyst at ADI. “After all, they’ve now had almost five years of practice in converting Prime Day traffic.”

Prime Day has also become more international, and its running for the first time in the UAE, Spain, Singapore, Mexico and other countries.

Many retailers are using Prime Day as an opportunity to highlight their own sales. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, eBay and others are all running sales, and analysts say that more than 250 retailers are trying to compete with Amazon today. Last year, there were 194, and in 2015 on the inaugural Prime Day there were only seven.

Online marketplace eBay is even calling its sale a “Crash Sale” in reference to Amazon’s previous troubles with stability due to web traffic. However, it hasn’t had any similar issues this year.

Website monitoring firm Catchpoint has been watching Amazon’s site and has reported that there haven’t been any issues. In fact, the firm reported that the website loads just as fast as it did last week when there were no sales. 

That could mean one of two things, either Amazon has improved its infrastructure or there simply isn’t as much interest in Prime Day as in previous years. One of the reasons for that could be that Amazon discounted one of its most popular items, the Echo Dot, to $24.99 before the event. It’s now $22 for Prime Day.