With the much-hyped on-going 48-hour Prime Day sales, along with rival company’s promotions going on, consumers are facing a tsunami of sales to sort through. As a consequence, a shopper’s ability to search through the most appropriate product for oneself becomes a little challenging if not daunting — task instead of a fun forage through a single site.
Simply put, when everything and every site is on sale, there is nothing different and everything feels the same especially when consumers are being bombarded with a deluge of emails, newsletters, text alerts, tweets, posts, and pop-up ads are all concurrently pointing consumers to the next fleeting opportunity.
This series of events however is happening at a time of digital shopping when almost everybody is now placing e-commerce orders, digitally paying bills, and booking travel online.
While some retail analysts are expecting that total Prime Day plus competitor sales could rise as much as 17 percent this year — topping the record $10 billion haul in 2020 — a larger-than-ever chunk of that increase will come from in-store sales via recently ramped-up omnichannel fulfillment offerings from retailers like Walmart, Target and Best Buy, which have thousands of physical locations.
Add the fact that capacity and other health-related COVID restrictions on retail stores have recently been lifted, including in New York and California, which have a combined 70 million residents. Plus, the surge of maskless in-store shoppers is set to contribute another big boost.
Nonetheless, the Prime Day economy is in full swing, not only spurring large rivals to offer their own alternative events but also pressuring small unaligned or independent sellers who have little choice but to match the no-cost, two-day shipping policies offered by literally every large retailer.
This prime day is coming out to be a “shopping holiday” that is “on par with high-profile shopping days like Thanksgiving and Black Friday, in terms of total online spend.”
