The first day of the Amazon Prime Day event anticipates the most online sales over a period of 24 hours so far this year. Sales during this mega-sale picked up the pace at 3 A.M ET on Monday and are set to cross off the $5.6 billion mark, representing 8.7% growth year over year, according to an index tracked by Adobe Analytics, which looks at more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites and over 100 million items across 18 product categories. According to Adobe, Monday also surpassed the $5.1 billion that consumers spent online over Thanksgiving Day last year.
Nevertheless, Adobe isn’t comparing this year’s Prime Day shopping extravaganza with last year’s, which occurred in October. The event h traditionally takes place in July until the Covid pandemic forced a delay. And this year, Amazon shifted the deals slightly sooner so that Prime Day would fall during what is typically a shopping lull in the second quarter. Hence, the event took place in the month of June.
Meanwhile, in order to compete with rivalries, Businesses including Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Kohl’s have been offering competing markdowns this week.
Adobe said that retailers that bring in more than $1 billion in revenue each year reported a 28% increase in e-commerce sales on Monday compared with the same day a year earlier, while smaller retailers doing less than $10 million in annual revenue saw a 22% lift.
“The first day of Prime Day successfully accelerated spending momentum for U.S. e-commerce to new heights, in an online retail environment that is already experiencing an elevated level of growth due to the pandemic,” said Jason Woosley, vice president of commerce product and platform at Adobe.
The biggest discounts during the 2-day event were observed for toys with price dipping by 12% on average. Appliances averaged a 5.2% discount, while electronics were marked down about 3%, Adobe said.
The firm said the best deals across all categories of products are still expected to come later this year during the holidays. A number of brands have opted not to discount any products this week. Logistics headaches have also put a tightened grip on inventories and have meant retailers have fewer goods on hand to markdown.