Amazon Counting on Biggest Prime Day Yet

Amazon.com's third annual Prime Day sales event officially kicked off last night at 9 pm ET, and will continue for 30 hours (25 percent longer than last year). The online retailer is hopeful this will be its biggest Prime Day yet. Internet Retailer forecasts that Prime Day sales will total $2.18 billion, which would be a 21 percent increase from 2016. In addition to driving sales, Amazon has leveraged Prime Day as a means to get shoppers to sign up for the $99/year service. According to Brand View, a global provider of online product positioning analytics, Amazon Prime subscriptions jumped 43.2 percent on Amazon Prime Day in 2016, despite web traffic decreasing 5.6 percent from 2015’s event.

Total Retail's Take: As of this morning there was little in the way of updates on Amazon Prime Day sales numbers (we'll likely know more later this afternoon, and certainly by tomorrow), but the fact that we're waiting with bated breath speaks to the power of the online retailer. It has turned a random Tuesday in July into what will be the fourth biggest shopping event of the year (trailing only Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Thanksgiving Day), and in all likelihood the biggest for Amazon. As mentioned, Prime Day achieves two objectives for Amazon: one, it drives sales in what's typically a slow period on the retail calendar and, two, perhaps more significantly, it entices consumers to sign up for its $99/year Prime service. Prime customers have proven to be more loyal and more profitable for Amazon.