Amazon Leverages Membership Surge With October Prime Day Push

Any doubts that deep and early discounting would be the theme of thus year’s holiday shopping season were laid to rest Monday (Sept. 26) as Amazon responded to recent moves by rival retailers with the announcement of a second Amazon Prime Day to be held in October.

The first-of-its-kind event by the eCommerce giant comes as it and its mass of third-party sellers are working to clear pandemic-era overstocks while also getting a jump on holiday selling that’s more critical than ever.

To be precise, Amazon is positioning this second pass at its annual sales event as the first-ever “Prime Early Access Sale,” and what “early access” does the mammoth event offer? Simply put, deals and discounts from a “Top 100” list featuring “Amazon’s lowest prices of the year” per a Monday press release — and an eight-week head start on Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in late November.

As consumers got whiplash pivoting from COVID concerns to inflation fears early in 2022, Amazon got its first taste of a sales slowdown in two decades and has moved aggressively throughout the year to get the flywheel spinning faster with Prime Day as a central strategy.

This year’s first Prime Day event returned to July, its traditional timing, after the pandemic caused the eCommerce site to fiddle with different dates, moving the event to October in 2020 and June in 2021.

The competing Walmart+ subscription launched in 2020, followed in June 2022 by the first-ever Walmart+ Weekend sale, with the Bentonville behemoth squarely zeroing in on Amazon’s dominance in both subscriptions and curated membership-only sales blowouts, at whatever time of year.

Retailers continue struggling to move out overstocks of athleisure apparel, home items like patio and garden and other big movers of the lockdown years that quickly fell out of style on the apparel side in 2022, as general merchandise ran up against consumers with diminished buying power who have already tricked out homes and yards during two years of at-home work and lockdown living.

Prime Day Clues and Cues

Analyzing results of Prime Day 2022 in July, PYMNTS surveyed nearly 2,200 Amazon and Walmart subscribers, finding that Prime Day shoppers used the summer event to grab clothing deals and bigger ticket items like consumer electronics, and healthy numbers in health and beauty products.

Runaway prices took the spark out of Prime Day in summer for many shoppers, with our study “Prime Day 2022: Inflation Hits, But Amazon Still Wins” noting that “Inflation had the greatest chilling effect on low-income Prime members. Among those who knew about Prime Day, 24% of subscribers earning below $50,000 per year said that high prices prompted them to not make purchases, while 16% of middle-income subscribers (those earning between $50,000 and $100,000 per year) and 11% of high-income subscribers (those earning more than $100,000 per year) said the same.”

Amazon has spent 2022 implementing strategies to add more value to the Prime subscription, from its huge investment in Thursday Night Football (TNF) to cinema sizzle like Tolkien’s “The Rings of Power” series. Widely published reports estimated that Prime added several million subscribers by getting the rights to TNF, with membership hovering in the range of 200 million subscribers.

Days earlier, on Sept. 22, Walmart announced a slate of guarantees for holiday shoppers centering on “no concerns” returns extending the return window on eligible items to Jan. 31, 2023 and expanded services like curbside returns.

For Walmart+ subscribers, the retailer is providing an even more effortless returns policy, saying “Walmart will offer Walmart+ members in select stores the option of returns picked up right from their doorstep, taking one more thing off their holiday ‘to-do’ list. When initiating an eligible return on the app, Walmart+ members will be able to schedule a return from the comfort of their home and complete the process without having to leave their doorstep. Members won’t need to provide a box or a label — simply hand off the return to one of our delivery drivers, and Walmart will handle the rest.”

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