AMZN October Prime Day Hits $9.86B, Deal-Hungry Consumers Keep Spending

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The team at Adobe crunched the numbers on this year's event, and for more, we are joined by Vivek Pandya, Lead Analyst at Adobe Digital Insights. Vivek, always great to have you. You know I wait for your data to come in after we've had a shopping event to talk about it. So let's dive into prime days. They generated 9.86 billion in overall sales over the two-day event that was up 8.5% from last year.

What does that tell us about the health of the consumer heading into what is considered the official holiday shopping season?

Vivek Pandya (0:32)

I think it tells us a lot. We're finding that they're very reactive to promotional pricing, that they're willing to trade up even into higher priced goods if they feel like the discount in promotion is strong. As you mentioned, when you're talking about $9.86 billion, that's between about a Thanksgiving and a Black Friday in terms of spend performance. So you have a consumer willing to think about the prime event as a prime opportunity to think about spending across all category goods. We're seeing upticks in electronics, personal care products. We saw the major categories see a nice boost off the prime event.

Many of these retailers provided deals across the entire week, so that really lifted up spend significantly for October.

SPEAKER_1 (1:20)

Vivek, now that we are looking at numbers that are that high, that you're saying it's comparable to what many people consider the biggest shopping days in the country with Thanksgiving and Black Friday, as we're seeing that much being spent now in October, how is that changing the way that retailers are planning their promotions and managing their inventory as it does appear that holiday shopping now kicks off with the lead off of Prime Days and Walmart specials also kicking off in this second week of October now?

Vivek Pandya (1:53)

I think they're really looking at the strategies and the tactics that will drive the best performance and results.

One of the key things we saw out of the data was social media, that traffic, that was up over 40% in terms of the revenue share it was contributing. You have the eventized moment really being able to take hold in October and it can really inform a lot of their thinking for the bigger shopping days. Ultimately, the mix of the products is very important because they're gonna wanna make sure that they have plenty of inventory across different categories based on the priority of the consumer. We think about something like electronics, that still has a lot more momentum to be had. When we think about the iPhone Duo and that release coming out, we think about the GTA 6 video game and what that could do for consoles and big screen televisions. I think they're really looking to see where the consumer is at in terms of adapting.

What we're finding is the consumer has a real sense of when these moments are happening and what retailers they want to compare against in order to take advantage of the birth steels.

SPEAKER_1 (3:00)

Vivek, one of the things I thought was very interesting, you hinted at it earlier, was the share in the most expensive products purchased rose by more than 20 percent compared to the year-to-date averages, electronics, that share was up 45 percent. So as you look at that, is that an indication that the consumer is still willing to spend if the deal is compelling enough? And how are you reconciling that with these continued conversations that we're having about affordability and households being under financial pressure and saying they feel worse off than they did last year, but they do seem to be trading up for some of these more expensive products?

Vivek Pandya (3:39)

I think that's exactly right in terms of how conscientious they are around these opportunities to spend if the deal is right, if the price is right, because yes, the consumer may have various opinions about the overall macro situation, but they also recognize that when you have these types of opportunities to really stock up on items, we saw baby care products really take off over that week.

We've, as you mentioned, seen electronics and high ticket item electronics really pick up. It's a factor of the consumer really being very aware of all their options and being made aware of what they could get in terms of additional promo codes. We're finding that through our survey data and what we're seeing out of the affiliates or the social media influencer performance, that is converting at an 11 times higher rate. So you have the consumer being made aware of all these deals, and that's when they think about, okay, now is probably the best time for me to stock up, given the pricing volatility that they've seen through the year.