The two-day annual Amazon Prime Day sales event has come and gone, and we can now examine how the retail titan’s latest iteration fared. Prime Day has come to carry a significant gravitational pull in the retail space. It is usually the biggest sale of the summer, dwarfing even July 4^th, and it often spurs competitors into offering their own blowout sales events. Retailers have been struggling so far this year and a big sales event could be the perfect remedy to propel companies into the second half of the year. Did Prime Day 2024 live up to the hype, or was it another tepid response from consumers?

Before we dig into Prime Day proper, we should take a look at how Amazon’s major competitors approached the sale. Retail giants like Walmart and Target took full advantage of the opportunity, yet they were relatively quiet on the two Prime days themselves. In a tweak from the last few years both Target and Walmart held their sales a week in advance. Target called it “Target Circle Week” and Walmart’s sale flew under the radar without a name or significant advertising. Both of those sales ended before Prime Day and neither retailer launched new sales alongside Amazon, opting instead to get consumers to buy early or miss out.

Amazon had early deals, yet they saved the deepest discounts for the 48-hour event, and it appears that they more than delivered, at least according to Amazon. The company reported that Prime Day 2024 was their most successful Prime Day ever with more items sold over the two days than any other Prime event. They also claim to have saved customers billions through discounts while also aiding small businesses who sold over 200 million items during the event. Amazon’s metrics don’t go much further than that, making it difficult to determine just how successful the sale was. A record number of items sold is a good sign, yet it gives us no indication of the types of goods or prices that resulted in the sale.

Numerator was able to get some more concrete data and analyzed 93,513 unique orders. They determined that 60% of households that shopped at the event placed more than two orders and the average household spend was $152. The average price of items was $28.06 with the top selling item being the Amazon Fire Stick. Amazon branded products are usually the top seller and other items, like trash bags and protein shakes, rounded out the top spots. Adobe Analytics also had an interesting statistic that on the second day of Prime Day; $7 billion was spent online outside of Amazon. It appears that Prime Day was also good for other businesses.

Amazon Prime Day and the surrounding sales by other retailers has been the strongest retail sales burst of the year. It remains to be seen if this will kick off a trend of stronger consumer confidence in the economy or was simply a blip that will be hard to replicate throughout the year. What is clear is that consumers have been waiting for a big sale and they are still willing to engage as long as discounts are ample. This bodes well for Black Friday and further confirms that consumer reluctance to spend is based on high prices.