Amazon Prime Day — 13 July

Prime Day is underway. National Today News has a team of researchers following the deals as they happen.  Track the latest Amazon Prime Day Deals as part of our round-the-clock coverage.

Sometimes, Christmas does come in July. At least holiday season sales do. With its annual Prime Day, Amazon — the seventh largest retailer in the world — has marked out the middle of the year as its own, personal, mega-shopping holiday, this year on July 13. 

Started in 2015 to celebrate Amazon’s 20th birthday, Amazon Prime Day has grown into a holiday to rival Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. and Singles Day in China. From relatively humble beginnings (we say relative because Amazon was a behemoth even then), Amazon Prime Day is now the biggest single day of shopping in the U.S. with more than 100 million products sold during 2018’s Prime Day. 

It’s also growing in terms of length having steadily gone from 24 hours of savings, to 30 hours, then 36 hours, and now a full 48 hours of epic deals. Leave it to Amazon to figure out how to double the hours in a day! 

Whether you’re an Amazon allegiant or an Amazon agnostic, there’s no escaping the impacts of Prime Day. Here are a few salient points about this one-of-a-kind global event. 

History of Prime Day Deals

The first Prime Day was a relatively small affair compared the behemoth it has become. Back in 2015, just 9 countries were included in Prime Day and more than 34.4 million items were ordered during the 24-hour period — amounting to 398 items per second. Hundreds of thousands of deeply discounted Amazon devices — such as the Kindle, Echo, and Fire streaming devices — were sold as were more than 24,000 Instant Pot 7-in-1 programmable pressure cookers. But that was just to name a few, Amazon sellers using the company’s Fulfillment by Amazon program saw a 300% increase in sales that first year indicating huge deals on nearly everything Amazon sells.  Last year, 17 countries participated in the event and the tally was more than 100 million items ordered, or more than 771 items per second of the 36-hour event. That year, the Fire TV Stick, and the Echo Dot were the biggest sellers among Amazon products. Customers ordered more than 5 million toys, beauty products, PCs  and accessories, apparel, and kitchen products. Millions of dollars were saved at the newly acquired Whole Foods as part of the Prime Day deals and more than 300,000 Instant Pots were sold. What’s more, small and medium businesses clocked more then $1.5 billion in sales.