Prime Day 2024: Everything we learned, and how to prepare for Fall Prime Day
The 10th year of Prime Day was another record-breaker.
Amazon says the event, which took place on 16-17 July, was once again the biggest yet, with record sales and more items sold than any previous Prime Day.
And it’s an exciting year for Prime sellers, as bigger margins are now possible, and there’s once again a second Prime Day coming in the autumn.
Here’s everything we’ve learned from this year’s event, and everything you need to know for the next one.
What we learned from Prime Day 2024: the figures
Amazon says “millions” more Prime members shopped compared to the 2023 event, which was itself a record-breaker.
Adobe Analytics reported sales of over $14.2 billion in the US across the two days - an 11% increase year-on-year.
We have some interesting findings of our own, pulled from our in-house database Compas:
- Prime Day Week 2023 vs Week Before was +60% in 2023, but +116% in 2024 - showing greater success this year
- Prime Day 2023 vs Prime Day 2024 was +12% in sales this year (like-for-like), 156% due to the addition of new brands. (This shows we as an agency slightly outperformed the 11% reported by Adobe, helping our clients to generate more sales through our service!)
Interestingly, the sales split between the two days was much more even this year: usually day 1 significantly outperforms day 2. Sales this year on day 2 were 83.9% of those on day 1, up from 70.3% in 2023, according to Momentum Commerce.
Jeff Cohen of Amazon Ads says: “This shift indicates that brands need to reconsider their budget pacing and promotional schedules to capitalise on this trend, utilising real-time analytics like Amazon Marketing Stream and Rapid Retail Analytics to adjust during key shopping events.”
What we learned from Prime Day 2024: the trends
Social media, influencers and celebrity culture were all used by Amazon to drum up enormous interest over Prime Day.
It continues to promote the event way beyond its own website: ‘Buy with Prime’ and off-Amazon deals were a major part of Prime Day in the US this year, as Amazon promoted brands that sell their goods with Prime delivery on their own websites.
High-performing categories
‘Small business products’ was a hugely popular category this year, particularly in the US, says Amazon.
Other popular categories included back-to-school and ‘product refresh cycle’, with the likes of lunchboxes, stationery, electronics and home furnishings all seeing very strong sales - much of it explained by Prime Day’s timing.
Amazon trumpeted the success of its independent sellers, mostly SMEs, which sold more than 200 million items.
Assisted buying
Rufus, Amazon’s new AI shopping assistant, got its big launch with Prime Day, as millions of customers used it to shop Amazon in a personalised way.
Amazon Inspire was also a big hit: Amazon’s new in-app shopping experience powered by other customers and influencers, allowing shoppers to browse videos and images from other users as well as brands for inspiration.
Discounting strategies
This year we noticed brands were strategising to employ smaller discounts but still get strong conversion from customers. This is the Prime Day dream: maintaining good margins while still getting the sales and customer satisfaction. We hope this will be a continuing trend as more and more sellers use data from AMC to precisely target customers who are already close to converting.
Read on to find out how we harnessed the power of AMC for our customers in this way!
The power of AMC: our Prime Day experiment
At e-Comas we’re big believers in the power of data. We use Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to devise bespoke ad strategies for our clients, using real data from their customers.
On Prime Day this year we worked with one of clients to optimise their DSP campaign with extreme targeting, using AMC’s Audience of Shoppers with Multiple Detail Page Views query.
Here’s what we did:
- We know that when a shopper views a product’s detail page multiple times, it indicates they are deep in the consideration phase and very close to making a purchase.
- We tested variations in the number of page views, discovering that more than three page views is the optimal number for conversion.
- We created a specific line item to target ‘shoppers with >3 page views’ in DSP with granular precision, and allocated a specific budget to test during Prime Day.
The results:
- Sales: $23,522
- Spend: $272
- ROAS: 86.
High-traffic days like Prime Day are ideal for testing AMC in this way, especially for bottom-of-funnel campaigns: you’ve got a much bigger potential audience, so more likelihood of high conversion, and you can maximise a relatively small budget.
Sam Millendo, our Head of Ads, says: “These staggering results demonstrate how AMC Audiences can help you fine-tune your targeting strategy. By leveraging AMC’s advanced audience capabilities, you can create a cluster of users with high shopping intent, leading to outstanding results.
“A big shoutout to our DSP Manager, Joel Alex, for implementing and tracking these results.”
Fall Prime Day: When is it?
Prime Big Deal Days is Amazon’s second Prime sales event, which takes place in October to make the most of holiday shopping traffic.
The dates have been announced as 8-9 October, so it’s coming up fast. While the deadline to submit a deal has already passed, make sure you take advantage of the increased traffic.
We recommend using Prime Exclusive Discounts, Coupons and Discounts to offer your customers ways to save money.
As with usual Prime Day, use the lead-up and lead-out times to capture even more traffic. We recommend Tentpole Analysis to build momentum for big sales events on Amazon, and that includes not only Prime events but Black Friday/Cyber Monday.