Amazon By The Numbers: A Deeper Look Into Prime Deals

Amazon By The Numbers: A Deeper Look Into Prime Deals

By Mihir Kittur, Ugam

Prime Day was a one-day shopping event on July 15, 2015 that Amazon touted would feature “more deals than Black Friday” for its Prime members. There were strong reactions to this among Amazon’s competitors and among consumers and the media, with much of the feedback dismissing the promotion as a non-event when all was said and done.

But with Amazon likely to continue using these events to promote Prime memberships, and with Black Friday not all that far off, it seems worth taking one more close look at exactly what Prime Day entailed.In anticipation of the event, Ugam gathered 40 best-selling products from Amazon across categories including:

• Board games
• Coffee machines
• Digital cameras
• Laptops
• Televisions
• Video games

We tracked these 40 products for prices from Amazon, Target and Walmart to find out who exactly had the best prices and discounts. While these products did not explicitly get highlighted as deals on Amazon, we saw some interesting changes in prices for them during the Prime Day event.

Out of these 40 products, 21 products were available on Amazon, Target and Walmart. Amazon had the lowest average price consistently across all eight data capture points between July 14 and 17.

Considering that prices were still indeed close on a host of products, we wanted to see how often, throughout the course of the day, Amazon was winning, losing or tying the pricing battle on the best-selling products where there was at least one other competitor.

Outside of Prime Day, Amazon generally offers more than 75% of the products sold across competitors at the lowest price (or tied for it), outright winning on price for over 30% of the products.But on Prime Day, Amazon had more discounts than usual, winning and tying on price for up to 90% of products. So while they might not have offered higher discounts, Amazon still offered the lowest prices across competitors on more bestselling items than usual.

On Prime Day, we saw two kinds of offers advertised by Amazon: Daily Deals and Lightning Deals. Some of the Daily Deals were on popular items, such as Skull Candy earbud headphones, a GoPro HERO4 camera and the iRobot Roomba 595 Pet Vacuum Cleaning Robot. Very few of those products were also discounted by Amazon’s competitors.These deals changed throughout the day, and as the following chart shows, the best discounts were found at the very beginning and towards the closure of Prime Day. 

Lightning Deals also refreshed very frequently, sometimes appearing for only a half hour at a time or even less. These products were not particularly popular. Instead, they were highly unique to Amazon and could mostly be considered niche items. These products were discounted by 50% to 80% and were rotated frequently. Lightning Deals included wide-ranging items such as blood pressure monitors, ankle supports, phone cases, books and pet products.

Overall, this analysis would seem to suggest that Amazon significantly out-discounted its competitors on Prime Day, even if they failed to find a way to truly wow consumers. Perhaps next time around they’ll focus more on making a splash with one or two head-turning deals on high-profile items, in an effort to better impress consumers. We’ll see what happens on Black Friday.