Great news – you’ve seen it through to the other side of Amazon Prime Day! Hopefully you had a booming increase in sales and have convinced some of those customers to become loyal shoppers with you.
Here at Brightpearl, we’re fortunate enough to work with over 1,200 SME retailers from various verticals; which means now that those busy 30 hours are behind us, we can take a look back on the key findings for how retailers performed this year, compared with 2016.
The main takeaway from this year is a positive increase in performance nearly the whole way across the board, including in order volume and gross merchandise value (GMV).
One thing we need to consider first is that this may have been due to 2017’s Prime Day being 30 hours long versus the 24 hour period we saw last year.
But before we get too ahead of ourselves, let’s take a look at just how much Amazon Prime Day in 2017 outperformed the 2016 version:
Looking at this list, it’s evident that retailers saw some really positive uptake during this year’s Prime Day versus last year. However, there was one key part of this year’s sales that did not see an increase – that of average order value.
The average order value across the entire day dropped in 2017 from $41 to $33 – a difference of 20%. We’ll discuss the reasons why that might have been very shortly. But first…
As can be expected, both years saw Amazon bring home the most amount of sales during Prime Day than all other sales channels put together.
We saw a staggering 30,617 sales orders taken via Amazon during this year’s Prime Day, versus 28,122 sales across all other channels combined.
When looking to Amazon Prime Day in 2016, last year wasn’t too far behind 2017 with a still impressive 23,033 orders taken via Amazon, versus 19,852 sales via all other channels combined.
There is one last key difference between Amazon Prime Day in 2017 and 2016, which is an interesting one. The highest peak in orders were at very different times:
So, what could have caused this difference in timing?
With this year’s Amazon Prime Day lasting 6 hours longer than last year, customers had more opportunity to browse now, and buy later. With a longer flash sale, the sense of urgency, although not evaporated completely, was diminished slightly.
Maybe customers browsed earlier in the day, and then chose to actually buy their favorite items whilst winding down for the evening? What do you think – could that be a possible cause?
Although more customers are being enticed to spend during the Prime Day sales, they are choosing to spend less individually, resulting in a 20% drop in average order value in 2017, compared with 2016.
There are a variety of reasons why this change may have occurred, including:
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading up on how retailers performed during Amazon Prime Day this year versus 2016, although we hope we haven’t bamboozled you with too many stats!
Did you expect these findings? Or did some of them surprise you? Please feel free to start a discussion in the comments section below…