Amazon, the online buying and selling behemoth that originated as online bookstore and subsequently became one of the Internet’s largest marketplaces, is celebrating its 20th birthday later this month. The fateful day is July 16, and to celebrate, Amazon is declaring that day Prime Day.
Prime Day is being dubbed by Amazon as the new biggest shopping day of the year. The celebration will be available to people in the United States, United Kingdom, and seven other countries who subscribe to Amazon’s Prime service, which grants users free two-day shipping and reduced costs for expedited shipping, as well as access to Amazon’s streaming music, movies, and television shows. The day will consist of long running Deals of the Day as well as quicker “Lightning Deals,” which could appear as frequently as every ten minutes throughout the day.
Anyone who is a member of Amazon Prime at the start of July 16 will have access to the mountain of deals Amazon plans to offer, including those who purchase it the day of. This is the crux of Amazon’s plan: they hope to create an even greater incentive for more people to subscribe to Prime service. In addition to the $99 annual subscription fee, CNET has pointed out that Prime members spend on average more than double non-Prime members per year: around $1,500 compared to $625.
If the deals being offered on Prime Day are anywhere close to the multitude and magnitude that Amazon is currently hyping them up to be, users who shop only casually on Amazon may feel added desire to try Prime out in order to capitalize on the 16th. Once they begin subscribing to Prime services, the statistics show that they usually remain subscribers for years on end, and also up their rate of purchasing through the website as compared to other vendors. Prime Day may represent a prime opportunity for Amazon to dramatically increase its Prime members for years in the future.