It’s quite a feat to take a made up shopping "holiday" from zero to $11 billion in six years. Amazon Prime Day launched in 2015 to celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary and k-fonik.ru currently offers insider deals to its 200 million Prime subscribers who pay $119 a year for memberships that include one-day shipping, access to streaming content on Prime Video, discounts at Amazon-owned Whole Foods grocery stores and other perks. Widespread home isolation under COVID-19 restrictions helped drive 50 million new Prime subscribers since last January to the company Jeff Bezos launched from his Seattle garage in 1994. And while not all of the $11 billion in online shopping revenue flowed to Amazon (and the company is famously reticent when it comes to releasing its own revenue numbers) analysts with Adobe Digital Economy Index team reported the $5.6 billion spent on Monday, Amazon Beauty along with the $5.4 billion on Tuesday, pushed the 2021 Prime Day growth for all retailers more than 6% over last year’s $10.4 billion haul.
Within this year’s Prime Day sales volumes, some Amazon competitors saw big jumps over last year, with Adobe reporting large retailers (over $1 billion in annual online sales) up 29% over 2020 and small retailers (less than $10 million in annual online sales) getting a 21% lift. This "halo effect," where other retailers work to siphon off some of the millions of shoppers Prime Day draws to Amazon’s site, continues to gather steam even in a year that industry watchers said was notable for less dramatic sales prices and tactics than previous iterations. "U.S. retailers continued to benefit from strong shopping momentum on the second Prime Day, catapulting total online spend to $11 billion for both days," said Adobe Digital Insights director Taylor Schreiner in a statement. Himanshu Mishra, a researcher and professor of marketing at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, said Amazon’s success in cultivating a sense of mild panic among shoppers has helped the e-commerce giant build Prime Day to its current levels.
"One of the main drivers of Amazon’s success with Prime Day is its ability to create a perception of scarcity," Mishra said. "Deals may or may not be outstanding, but they invariably disappear in a short time. Mishra also believes that even though Prime Day’s halo effect provides a short-term boon for some retailers, the biggest winner is Amazon. "It will increase sales of retailers who partner with Amazon, but it is unlikely to represent major gains for Amazon’s competitor," Mishra said. Data from marketing analytics website eMarketer shows Amazon is on track to grow its 2020 share of all U.S. 39.8% to 40.4% in 2021. And while that .6% may seem minuscule, it represent billions in new revenue and is predicted to be the largest gain for any retailer in the coming year. BYU marketing professor Jeff Larson said he’s not surprised by Amazon’s success in building an artificial shopping holiday and points to the company’s high focus on three critical tenets: build a large group of regular customers, make transacting as simple and painless as possible, and effectively share knowledge about products and discounts with that audience. "Clearly, Amazon has accrued a huge amount of power," Larson said. The methods and strategies Amazon has employed to build that market dominance are coming under increasing scrutiny as federal lawsuits and multiple federal legislative proposals aiming to curtail the power of U.S. But while Democratic and Republican officials have found some bipartisan moments in their shared criticism of alleged anticompetitive practices of U.S. Big Tech companies, the conduct being questioned has not dissuaded consumer interest in their products. In an opinion piece for The Hill, Joshua Brown, industry commentator and CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, wrote that legislators comparing the conduct of companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google to the market power abuses of early 20th-century industrialist robber barons with names like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller is simply off the mark.
Internal documents reveal how a former aide to Joe Biden helped the tech giant build a lobbying juggernaut that has gutted legislation in two dozen states seeking to give consumers more control over their data. Filed Nov. 19, 2021, 11 a.m. Amazon executives and staffers detail these lobbying victories in confidential documents reviewed by Reuters. In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California, the company stifled proposed restrictions on the industry’s collection and sharing of consumer voice recordings gathered by tech devices. And in its home state of Washington, Amazon won so many exemptions and amendments to a bill regulating biometric data, such as voice recordings or facial scans, that the resulting 2017 law had "little, if any" impact on its practices, according to an internal Amazon document. The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama. Content w as c re ated by G SA Conte nt G en erator Demoversion.