Surge In COVID Cases Prompts Amazon To Delay Prime Day In India, Canada

With COVID-19 cases worsening in India and Canada, Amazon will be postponing its Prime Day, CNBC reported.

The two-day discount event will be temporarily paused in those countries, although Amazon didn’t specify any reschedule dates, according to CNBC.

India has been ravaged by the pandemic in recent weeks, accounting for more than 46 percent of the COVID-19 cases in the world in the past week, CNBC reported. The country has crossed over 20 million cases of COVID-19 as of this week. Media reports have said the crematoriums and burial grounds have become overwhelmed with bodies of people who died from the deadly disease.

Because of that, many states in the country have bolstered restrictions and implemented new lockdowns or curfews, according to CNBC.

Canada saw new COVID-19 infections in April rising higher than the rates in the U.S. for the first time since the beginning of the global crisis. And the country has seen slower vaccination rates as compared to the U.S., CNBC reported.

Last year when the pandemic was surging worldwide, Amazon was forced to postpone Prime Day, which it formed in 2015 as a way to offer broad swathes of discounts. It rescheduled the event for October 2020 instead of its usual July date.

This year, though, things will still be different from other years in that the eCommerce giant plans to hold Prime Day in June, according to CNBC. It said the reasoning for that is June would likely be “better for customers, sellers and vendors,” who may be vacationing in July now that the pandemic has receded in several parts of the world.

Recode reported in April that Prime Day would be a multi-day event in June, and, as usual, would remain exclusive for only Prime members. Recode speculated that the move to June rather than July was at least partly influenced by Wall Street, with Amazon execs looking to boost sales in the second quarter of the year to help with comparisons year over year.