Dive Brief:
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Shoppers on Amazon’s “Prime Day” two weeks ago reportedly bought nearly 400 things each second from the retailer, easily besting Black Friday for the retailer.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other retailers also advertised their own sales on that day to compete with Amazon.
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All that shopping activity could end up boosting July’s retail sales by as much as .6%, and boost Q3 sales by $2 billion, say analysts at Japanese holding company Nomura.
Dive Insight:
We all know by now that Twitter was full of snark regarding Amazon’s Prime Day, but that the retailer apparently nevertheless made out like a bandit.
All the action, while it may have meant a lot of things like diapers and laundry detergent were sold as well as cameras and televisions (a bit different, in other words, from Black Friday), could end up boosting the Commerce Department’s retail sales numbers for July and Q3. We’ll know that with certainty in a few weeks.
If shoppers did scoop up mostly mundane household items, the numbers may simply have shifted to July. After all, there’s a limit to how many diapers or laundry detergent one needs. If everyone filled up in mid-July, that means August’s numbers could go down.
But shoppers reportedly bought some 34.4 million things that day at Amazon alone. That, and the number of new Prime members the retail giant signed up, could be a boon to the sales figure for July and coming weeks.