Shoppers Rang Up Busiest Days This Year Thanks to Prime Day

Amazon said Prime members purchased over 300 million items worldwide during this week’s 2-day Prime Day 2022 shopping event (held on Tuesday and Wednesday) and saved over $1.7 billion. In a press release issued on Thursday, Amazon called it the “biggest Prime Day event ever,” also revealing it had over 200 million paid Prime members worldwide.

Some statistics it shared included the following:

• Prime members in the U.S. did the most shopping from 8 p.m.—9 p.m. PT on Wednesday, July 13 during the U.S. Prime Day event.
• Some of the best-selling categories in the U.S. this Prime Day were Consumer Electronics, Household Essentials, and Home.
• During the three weeks leading up to Prime Day, customers shopped from small businesses included in the Support Small Businesses to Win Big sweepstakes across all 50 U.S. states, with those in Delaware, New York, and Wyoming seeing the biggest sales per capita.

Marketplace Pulse spotted something different this year: Prime Day deals that took place off of the Amazon.com platform thanks to the Buy with Prime service launched in the spring. The blog spotted a few dozen off-Amazon stores displaying banners with verbiage such as, “Use Buy with Prime to get a 20% discount applied at checkout.”

Thanks to the halo effect, shoppers were on the lookout on and off Amazon.com. According to the Adobe Digital Economy Index, total online sales in the US reached $11.9 billion across the two days ($6 billion on day 1, and $5.9 billion on day 2), representing 8.5% growth compared to last year’s Prime Day total online revenue of $11 billion.

Adobe said shoppers leveraged Prime Day sales for back to school shopping and found popular product categories seeing an uptick included Audio Equipment, Appliances, and Boys & Girls Apparel.

Google Shopping was also monitoring shopping trends this week. It said search interest for “Best Deals” more than doubled on July 12 versus the day before, suggesting that people were doing their due diligence in researching product prices.

Google Shopping also revealed the most-searched products “on sale” on July 12:

1) TVs
2) Clothes
3) Shoes
4) Washer and dryer sets
5) Patio furniture
6) Flat screen tv
7) Alexa
8) Mattresses and box springs
9) Air conditioners
10) Nintendo Switch

Using purchase data and surveys, Numerator found the average Prime Day 2022 spend per order was $52.26, which was up from $44.75 in the same reporting period on Prime Day 2021. 56% of orders were placed for $20 or less, and 13% were for more than $100.

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.