July 15 marks Amazon Prime Day! The popular e-commerce website is hosting a special event with Black Friday-esque sales in celebration of their 20th birthday. In fact, Amazon has stated that this one-day sale will be bigger than Black Friday. With Black Friday 2014 U.S. online revenues totaling over $1.5 billion, those are some bold words. This global shopping event is offering deep discounts to users in the U.S., Spain, Japan, U.K., Italy, Germany, France, Canada, and Austria, but the catch is, the discounts are only available to Amazon Prime members in those countries.
For $99 a year, Amazon Prime subscribers are able to get free two-day shipping on over 20 million items, free same-day shipping on a million items, the ability to stream movies and TV shows, early access to select lightening deals, borrow thousands of books from Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, and more! Amazon is currently running a free 30-day trial period for the Amazon Prime services, allowing people the ability to participate in these spectacular deals. Though it may look like they are giving away the milk for free, it’s a pretty genius strategy.
Not only will they be pushing billions of their most popular products, but they will also be increasing the amount of new Amazon Prime subscribers, in turn, increasing Amazon’s revenue in the long run. There are currently approximately 40 million Prime subscribers, and according to a study by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, Prime users spend an average of $1,340 a year on the site. That’s over $54 billion in revenue a year! So if this promotion is successful, it could increase their revenue drastically.
Now, more importantly, Amazon is 20?! That makes us feel old! Amazon was founded on July 6, 1994, and sold its first book in July 1995. That’s right, Amazon used to only sell books! The website sure has evolved over the years. Will you be participating in Prime Day? Our shopping addicts on staff sure will be!