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Amazon Prime Day 2019 (Europe)
Lightning Deals
Prime Day is a potential major sales boost for any Amazon seller.
The submission window for Lightning Deals is open in Seller Central but will close on May 17th 2019 at midnight. So now is a great time to revise whether Prime Day should be part of your Amazon sales strategy.
What is Amazon Prime Day and why does it exist?
Prime Day is Amazon’s annual retail holiday.
It was introduced in 2015 as a one-day only sales event that boasted more deals than Black Friday and also celebrated Amazon’s 20th anniversary as a company.
Though the first one disappointed some expectations, subsequent Prime Days have improved in both the quality and quantity of deals.
Is it open to all Amazon shoppers?
Prime Day is only for Amazon Prime subscribers.
Prime membership costs $119 a year. Despite this, Amazon hit 100 million global Prime subscribers in April 2018.
About 8 million are in the UK.
According to research, Amazon Prime members typically spend almost double that of non-Prime members.
Is Prime Day for USA only?
No, the event has been made available to more countries outside the US every year.
In 2017, it was extended to Canada, Mexico, the UK, Spain, Italy, India, Germany, Japan France, China, Belgium, and Austria.
In 2018 to Australia, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
When is Amazon Prime Day 2019?
Amazon typically announces the official date in late June or early July.
In 2018, it only officially announced the date a couple of weeks in advance.
Prime Day will probably be sometime July 2019 as every Prime Day has been so far.
Most likely mid July.
Predictions range around Tuesday July 16th – with the deals themselves actually starting the day before on the 15th and ending at some point on Wednesday the 17th.
How long does it last? Is it literally a day?
In 2018, Prime Day ran from 3 p.m. ET on Monday, July 16 through Tuesday, July 17, so our prediction is that it will be in mid-July again this year and last 36 hours, if not longer.
Amazon Prime Day itself seems to be growing each year. It grew from 24 hours initially, to 30 hours and then 36 in 2018. There is speculation it could be going on for 40 hours this year.
Amazon Black Friday deals now last about a week
Amazon won’t be announcing the official date of Amazon Prime Day 2019 for a while yet.
Is it only on Amazon?
While November’s Black Friday deals certainly see a wider range of retailers unleashing some of the hottest deals you’ll find all year, Prime Day is mainly about Amazon rocking the best offers.
Sure, other retailers might try to match prices or launch rival sales (and of course we’ll be sure to roundup the best of them too) but make no mistake, the best deals and low prices will be found at Amazon.
How big is Prime Day?
The online sales event of the summer was the biggest day of sales in its history in 2018, with over 89 million visits logged (10% more than in 2017).
We can only see 2019 being even bigger as the sale has grown every year since launching back in 2015.
How much money did Amazon make on Prime Day?
Amazon was predicted to gross $3.4 billion on Prime Day 2018, although Amazon doesn’t release such information.
It did announce that third party sellers sold $1 Billion dollars of products in just “one day”.
As for its own sales, Amazon was content to say that “sales this Prime Day 2018 surpassed Cyber Monday, Black Friday and the previous Prime Day, when comparing 36-hour periods, making this once again the biggest shopping event in Amazon history.”
As ever with Amazon, we have to learn to read between the lines…but it’s certainly huge for 3rd party sellers.
Delivery Times for Prime
Amazon has promised to cut delivery times worldwide for customers of its Prime service.
Prime users in the USA get free two-day delivery at the moment, but the plan is to cut that to one day soon.
Prime customers already get free one-day delivery in much of the UK.
Amazon budgets $800m (£620m) to cut delivery times elsewhere, including in the States.
There is no deadline for when delivery times would be cut but Amazon said it expects to make “steady progress” this year.
Walmart and Target have been speeding up their delivery in the US and offer two-day shipping on many items. Amazon needs to stay ahead of its competition.
Amazon already sends a lot of products to US cities within 24 hours. However, industry analysts have warned that extending the service to more remote parts of the States will be hard.
Amazon Profits Record in Q1 of 2019
Amazon reported a first quarter profit of $3.6bn (£2.8bn) in 2019, double the same period in the previous year.
It was its fourth successive quarter of record profit.
In the first quarter sales rose 17% to $59.7bn. Amazon expects sales to grow between 13% and 20% in the second quarter.
Sales surged at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides computing services to companies over the internet – a service know as cloud computing.
Launched in 2002, AWS has become a crucial part of Amazon’s business, and sales rose 41% to $7.7bn in the three-month period to the end of March.
“While the cost of building the data-driven infrastructure to support the cloud systems is vast, the fact it requires such deep pockets actually works in Amazon’s favour,” said George Salmon, an analyst at stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdown.
“It’s difficult to see how a new challenger can wrestle business away from the likes of Amazon, Google, and the latest member of the $1tn club, Microsoft.”
Microsoft has seen its stock market value top $1tn after reporting better-than-expected sales and profits. Its price passed the mark briefly on Thursday, before its share price fell back.
