Amazon Prime Creates Online Home Run

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 13, 9:13AM EDT

Key Points

The Success Of Amazon Prime Day May Reflect The Rest Of The Industry
The Prime Day Data May Not Be Accurate

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Amazon Prime Creates Online Home Run — © Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images

Amazon Prime Day, the four-day period during which the e-commerce company offers special deals and signs up new Prime members, helped lift total online sales across America by 30.3% for the period to $24.1 billion. The number topped forecasts by Adobe, which tracks online purchases. Bloomberg pointed out that this likely means that other huge online businesses like Walmart.com also did well.

Online shopping firm Numerator put the average spend per item at $53.34. Many people ordered more than one item, so the average order was $156.37. Not all order sizes, however, were entirely impressive. Fifteen percent of all people who bought online made orders of under $10. Another 22% made orders under $20.

Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) announcement about Prime Day was less detailed. It reported “Amazon Prime Day 2025 delivers record sales and savings in an expanded four-day shopping event.” Customers, it said, saved billions of dollars.

What none of the data shows is whether people bought items during Prime Day that they would have bought anyway. Amazon’s North America online sales were $92.9 billion in the most recent quarter. Amazon does not break that out by day. This quarterly number was an increase of less than 8% from the year before. So, the Prime Day increase was well above the growth rate for the last quarter.

Other retailers use Prime Day to increase their sales. Walmart (NYSE: WMT) has its own “Prime Day” during which it sells hundreds of thousands of items at discounts. The challenge for an analysis of the big retailer’s figures is that Walmart does not offer a dollar figure for its revenue during the period.

Special online sales increases are a way for these retailers to create bragging rights. On the other hand, a 30.3% increase is larger than Amazon has had during the balance of the year.

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.