As expected, Amazon is bringing back Prime Day — its biggest shopping day of the year — for a second go round. The company has announced that Prime Day 2016 will happen on July 12.
Anyone in 10 countries with a Prime membership by that date will be eligible to shop more than 100,000 deals — a number that Amazon says makes it the company’s biggest shopping event ever. The 10 countries where Prime Day will happen are the US, Canada, UK, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Austria and Japan.
In addition to the July 12 sale, Amazon says it’ll offer Prime members a full week of “countdown deals” from July 5 through July 11.
Amazon launched Prime Day a year ago as a celebration of its 20th anniversary, but the real idea was (and is) to sell products and boost the number of Prime memberships. The company has never given a specific count of Prime members; the news release announcing this year’s event only says there are “tens of millions” of members. Analysts have estimated the figure at 54 million, and these are Amazon’s most loyal customers — spending almost double what non-Prime members spend on the site each year, according to analysts.
Amazon declared the first Prime Day a big success, even though it drew fire from shoppers who were unhappy with the product selection and fast sellouts.
This year, Amazon seems to want to avoid similar complaints, particularly in the US. The news release promises that “the deal inventory of TVs in the U.S. will be nearly 2x [more] than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined,” and says US shoppers “will find toy deals nearly all day on Prime Day.” Amazon also says there’ll be easier ways to find deals in specific product categories, and a “watch-a-deal” tool that shoppers can use to get alerts when specific deals begin. Amazon also says owners of its Echo, Dot and Tap devices will get their own specials.
Though it’s obviously good business for Amazon, last year’s Prime Day had a ripple effect across the retail web. Industry analysts said they saw shopping activity rise an average of 20 percent on major retail brand web sites on Prime Day. Best Buy’s website was a big winner, with sales rising 200 percent year-over-year according to ChannelAdvisor. Sears saw an 88 percent YoY gain, and NewEgg was up 40 percent.
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