Amazon’s Prime Day Is A ‘Dress Rehearsal’ For The Holidays

With Amazon’s Prime Day on the horizon, the eCommerce retailer is gearing up for another sales event. But Amazon’s retail holiday also has the goal of making Prime a part of each household – and a way to serve as a “training day” for new channels such as Whole Foods, Twitch and the Echo line, as TheStreet reported.

“Prime Day serves multiple purposes, and one of them is from a logistical standpoint,” Tom Forte of D.A. Davidson & Co told TheStreet. “It’s a dress rehearsal for the holidays as well. And I think it’s increasingly becoming a question of: ‘How do we incorporate every retail app we have into the Prime Day story?'”

The event also brings in sales for the eCommerce retailer, of course: Estimates from Digital Commerce 360 indicated that the holiday drove a whopping $2.41 billion in purchases in 2017. The most popular product was the Echo Dot, according to an Amazon press release. Additionally, Amazon indicated that sales jumped by 60 percent from the prior year’s Prime Day.

The news comes as this year’s Prime Day will include the debut of a new feature. As an Amazon spokesperson had said, “Amazon is also hosting a series of Unboxing Prime Day events around the world — with surprise events being unboxed in London, Tokyo, Milan, Los Angeles and New York. These events are stemming from a customer insight. We learned that our members continue to love Prime Day and all of the deal shopping, but they also want to feel special and experience their benefits in the real world.”

Amazon does not have Prime Day to itself. Last week, eBay, hoping to steal some of the retail thunder, announced it would offer exclusive deals across a host of categories next week. In a press release, eBay took a swipe at Amazon, saying that no membership is required to get the deals during the shopping event.