Amazon’s Goals for Prime Day and Prime Members
Amazon’s 9th annual Prime Day is approaching. Since the first Prime Day celebrated Amazon’s 20th anniversary in 2015, Amazon has used Prime Day to encourage committed Amazon shopping behavior - as well as driving a lot of revenue in a very short period of time.
The first Prime Day focused on building Prime membership, and of course, that remains a consistent goal. Subsequent Prime Days have highlighted streaming video usage, purchasing and then shopping on Amazon Echo devices, apparel shopping, installing and using the Amazon Shopping app, and shopping at Whole Foods stores, among other things.
At its core, Prime Day is about shopping at Amazon - more.
And the critical path to more shopping at Amazon is buying a wider variety of things from Amazon. After starting as a (very big) bookstore, Amazon quickly became an important electronics retailer. Toys and home products were other early additions. Today, Amazon wants to be the biggest and best apparel retailer and grocery seller, along with everything else.
The plan works. We track the number of Amazon categories (using the 11 departments that date back 10 years or more) that customers purchase. Prime members shop in more departments than other customers. 73% of Prime members have shopped in four or more departments, compared to 59% of non-Prime customers (Chart 1).