Amazon Gets Clever: Prime Day Doesn’t Start on Prime Day. It Starts Today.

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 28, 6:41AM EDT

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Amazon Gets Clever: Prime Day Doesn’t Start on Prime Day. It Starts Today. — © NoDerog / Getty Images

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) has announced that its annual Prime Day (actually two days) will run over October 13 and October 14. The period will balloon Amazon’s sales for the quarter, as it has done for five years. However, Amazon Prime Day sales begin today for Prime members, a clever tactic.

The sales that start today, however, are almost entirely of Amazon’s own products. That means that these products will be available for almost two weeks with little competition, allowing it to sell products that likely have high margins. These products also can gain market share in their categories early. The company is pushing its Alexa-powered home assistant, Fire TV, Kindle Reader, Kindle Books, its grocery business, toys and small appliances now.

Prime Day was pushed back due to COVID-19 this year. Generally, the date is set in July and helps shake off the weak third-quarter period of Amazon revenue. The fourth quarter traditionally is Amazon’s best quarter because of the holidays. With Prime Day and the holidays in the same quarter, Amazon easily will post a record quarter.

Prime Day starts at midnight Pacific Time on Tuesday, October 13, and runs through Wednesday, October 14. Prime members in the United States, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Spain, Singapore, Netherlands, Mexico, Luxembourg, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, China, Canada, Belgium, Austria, Australia, Turkey and Brazil may participate.
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One of the cleverest Amazon tactics is that people who are not part of Amazon’s Prime subscription service can take a 30-day free trial. Those who stay on pay $199 a year. This gives them access to a number of benefits, the best known of which are free shipping and access to Amazon’s streaming media service.

Amazon says it wants to help small businesses this year, which in many cases have been ravaged by the pandemic. People who spend $10 or more with one of Amazon’s small business affiliates will get a $10 credit. Amazon says more than half of the items sold at Amazon.com are by third parties. That means the small business package may help hundreds of thousands of companies.

The breadth of the sale is the primary reason Prime Day does so well. This year, it has gathered over a million products that will be discounted, a surefire way to boost its fourth-quarter revenue and press its Prime membership count higher. And Prime members do not have to wait until Prime Day.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.