Report: Amazon Prime Day 2019 will push U.S. e-commerce sales to over $2 billion

A report from Adobe’s analytics arm predicts Amazon’s Prime Day 2019 sales event, which began today, to have another sizable impact on the U.S. e-commerce market. The company expects a revenue lift for top retailers — those with over $1 billion in online sales — to reach 79% this year, up from the 60% lift they sale during Prime Day 2018. And it says that Prime Day will become the third time outside the holiday season that U.S. e-commerce spending will top $2 billion, as it previously did on Labor Day 2018 and Memorial Day 2019.

“We attribute this growth in sales to the fact that the big e-commerce competitors have become better at reaping the benefits of this artificial holiday,” said Taylor Schreiner, principal analyst at Adobe Digital Insights (ADI). “After all, they’ve now had almost five years of practice in converting Prime Day traffic.”

The $2 billion figure includes Amazon, Adobe says, but is limited to U.S. e-commerce sales.

However, Prime Day itself now runs across a number of international markets, including for the first time, the United Arab Emirates, alongside the U.K., Spain, Singapore, Netherlands, Mexico, Luxembourg, Japan, Italy, India, Germany, France, China, Canada, Belgium, Austria, and Australia.

Top Amazon rivals like Walmart, Target, eBay, Best Buy and others, are running their own sales today, as are many e-commerce retailers. In fact, an earlier report from RetailMeNot predicted that, this year, 250 retailers will compete with Amazon on Prime Day. That’s up from 194 last year and up from just 7 on the first Prime Day in 2015.

eBay, in particular, went a little dirty with its counter sale, calling it a “Crash Sale” — a reference to how Amazon.com tanked on Prime Day 2018.

But that branding has paid off — according to the latest from website monitoring firm Catchpoint, Amazon has not had stability issues as of yet. The firm has been tracking Amazon’s desktop and mobile websites since 3 AM ET today, and as of 10 AM ET reports no problems. It even found that the average website load times are just as fast as last week when there was no sale.

That either speaks to big improvements to site stability to address last year’s issues, or perhaps a decline in consumer interest in Prime Day 2019 — perhaps because one of Prime Day 2018’s top-sellers, the Echo Dot, had a huge price cut before Prime Day began to $24.99. (Now it’s $22 for Prime Day.) We won’t know until the reports roll in later in the day, and after the sales event wraps.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/15/report-amazon-prime-day-2019-will-push-u-s-e-commerce-sales-to-over-2-billion/