Amazon’s third annual, “WOW, look how cheap we are” Prime Day came and went, and the ecommerce giant has announced some interesting nuggets about the 2017 fire sale.
Perhaps most notably, the best-selling item on Amazon was the Amazon Echo Dot, which was available for $35, compared to the usual $50. This was despite its bigger brother, the Amazon Echo, going on sale at half-price — $90, compared to its standard $180.
Though the bigger incarnation offered more value for the money, the difference between $35 and $90 is still too large a gulf for many, especially for a relatively new product line that people may not be completely sold on.
It is worth noting here that the Echo Dot was not only the “most popular” item purchased by Prime users on Prime Day, this popularity was also enough to make it the “best-selling product from any manufacturer in any category across Amazon globally,” according to Amazon.
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Corner the market
Amazon was keen to push consumers toward Echo and Alexa in the buildup to Prime Day — besides Alexa-only exclusive deals, for the first time ever Amazon allowed users to sign up for a Prime subscription by asking Alexa.
How much of an impact that had on Prime sign-ups isn’t clear, but the company has revealed that more people signed up on Prime Day “than on any single day in Amazon history.”
True to form, Amazon is pretty vague on specific numbers for Prime Day, saying things like: “Tens of millions of Prime members made a purchase on Prime Day 2017, more than 50 percent higher than the prior year.” And: “Prime members bought seven times more Amazon Echo devices globally than on Prime Day 2016.”
Additionally, Amazon noted that “Prime Day sales surpassed Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”
Such information is kind of useful, but it’s difficult to read too much into it without hard numbers.
At any rate, with Apple gearing up to launch its Echo-style HomePod speaker later this year, and Google already selling a similar device, Amazon is evidently keen to corner the smart digital assistant market — and it may have gone some way toward achieving that goal thanks to its gargantuan annual sales campaign.
