Tuesday's Market Minute: Prime Day: The New Black Friday

When Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN launched Prime Day in 2015, the e-commerce giant changed online shopping like no company before. Four years later, other mega retailers have decided to benefit from the now two-day summer sale that boosts Amazon’s bottom line as well as traffic to its site. Competition from Target Corporation TGT, eBay Inc EBAY, and Walmart Inc WMT may take some of the record-breaking sales Amazon saw last year during this time, but for the consumer it creates as arbitrary a reason to pull out the credit card as Black Friday. Online sales across all retailers reached $7.9B on Cyber Monday last year, a 20% increase from the previous year, and $6.2B on Black Friday, according to Adobe Analytics. Like Black Friday and the days surrounding, Prime Day has become a tool for investors to indicate strength in the consumer.

Last fall, Amazon said Cyber Monday and Black Friday were its biggest shopping days in history, in which more than 180M items were sold in the five-day span between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. In comparison, 100M items were sold during the day-and-a-half of Prime Day sales last summer. With day one of Prime Day behind, and Amazon’s chart nearing new all-time highs (Walmart is at them), results from this year will be highly anticipated – and may narrow down the competition from who could and couldn’t hang with the big dogs.

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