Amazon Prime Day 2024 Recap
Amazon announced that this year’s Prime Day was its biggest ever, with record-breaking sales
• Participation in Prime Day continues to climb, even though the average spend has fallen.
• The demographics have shifted—today’s Prime Day shoppers are older and have higher income than in the past.
• Prime Day is a major cause of injuries for the warehouse workers.
While there’s no shortage of places to shop online these days, Amazon.com sits at the top of the pyramid as the go-to place for most American consumers.
And it’s indisputably No. 1 by a lot, with monthly traffic of 3.2 billion. Compare that to second and third place: eBay with 589 million and Walmart.com with 581 million. It’s no contest.
So, given its big slice of the pie, it’s no surprise the annual two-day Prime Day, which began in 2015 as a 24-hour event, is heavily watched.
And here’s what they saw: Amazon has announced that this year’s Prime Day, held last Tuesday and Wednesday, was its biggest ever, with record-breaking sales.
The company released a statement saying “members shopped deals from popular brands as well as small businesses. Independent sellers—most of which are small and medium-sized enterprises who help make Amazon’s wide selection possible—sold more than 200 million items.”
Meanwhile, the profile of the average Prime Day shopper is changing, as noted by John Dick, CEO and founder of the Pittsburgh-based market intelligence company Civic Science.
His research team surveyed more than 15,000 Amazon shoppers in real-time, hour by hour, and found a shift in how they approached the event this year.
More Amazon customers surveyed had planned to shop the event this year compared to last year—55% reported they would participate in 2024, up from 49% a year ago.
According to the report, those from the surveyed list who actually shopped the event, which is always a smaller number than those who reported they would, was 44%, up from last year’s 42%.
This year, 40% of the shoppers surveyed purchased essentials—they weren’t shopping for sales on big-ticket merchandise.
“That is very much a sign of the times that we’re in today,” Dick said Thursday during a webinar. “There was more practicality this year. There was less early pre-holiday shopping and less early back-to-school shopping.”
He also noted the average Prime Day consumer reported spending less this year than last. Sales increased for electronics, home goods and beauty supplies, but decreased in two categories: One was kitchen and appliances, and the other was fitness and health.
Brand names had less importance this year, too, Dick noted. “People care more now about price and value vs. brand name,” he said.
This year’s shopper was more likely to have planned what to buy and less likely to make impulse purchases. Consumers have a tighter grasp on their wallets these days, Dick observed.
Other key points from the surveyed Amazon shoppers:
• Older consumers are spending more
• Gen Z’s and Millennials are spending less
• Households with less than $50,000 in annual income shopped the most (37% of shoppers)
• The number of households with more than $100,000 in annual income who shopped the event was 33%, up from last year’s 29%
Luckbox doesn’t want to take the fun out of shopping, but it has its dark side. It’s not widely known that Amazon Prime Day is “a major cause of injuries for the warehouse workers who make it possible,” according to a report released Monday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
The report noted “the extremely unsafe conditions in Amazon warehouses” during the two peak periods and called on the company to do more to protect warehouse workers.
The report makes public, for the first time, the company’s internal data on warehouse injury rates. During Prime Day 2019 the rate of “recordable” injuries—those Amazon is required to disclose to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—exceeded 10 per 100 workers, more than double the average in the U.S. warehousing and storage industry, the data indicated.
