Amazon claims its second annual Prime Day was its biggest sales day ever, but shopping cart glitches and less-than-mindblowing sales estimates deflated high expectations for a holiday that the world's largest retailer made up simply because it could.
The company said orders for that sale, open only to Prime members, rose 60 percent worldwide and 50 percent in the US on Tuesday compared to Prime Day 2015. The event was the company's single biggest sales day for Amazon devices. And third-party sellers saw orders nearly triple year-over-year, Amazon said.
But the company did not provide Prime Day's total sales, making it hard to know exactly how successful it was. Instead, it offered qualitative descriptions: "Prime members have voice shopped with Alexa, purchasing enough toilet paper to span to the International Space Station," Amazon said yesterday.
The company did reveal that Prime Day 2015 accounted for 2 percent of Amazon’s third quarter growth—about $400 million in additional revenue. That's nothing compared to the $14 billion Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba earned with its own invented holiday, Single’s Day, in November—though it isn't quite a perfect parallel to compare the entire Chinese consumer market to Amazon's customer base of Prime members.
As with last year, customers had complaints—particularly with adding items to their shopping carts. Still, Amazon’s stock rose 6 percent in the week following last year’s Prime Day. This year, shareholders didn't settle for anything less than exceptional. During Prime Day, Amazon shares hit a new intraday high of $761. Today, the day after Prime Day, stocks are flat, trading at $745 as of this writing.
