Amazon Celebrates 20-Year Anniversary With “Prime Day” Sales Event

Read original story on: ZDNet

To celebrate its 20-year anniversary since launch, Amazon is planning a one-day-only sales event dubbed “Prime Day” that aims to encourage both transaction volumes and prime membership sign-ups.

Looking to make it into what Amazon calls “a global shopping event,” the ecommerce giant claims it will be offering “more deals than Black Friday,” exclusively for Prime members in the U.S., U.K., and 7 other global markets. Considering that Prime members on average reportedly spend $1,500 on Amazon a year, more than doubling the $625 non-members spend, it makes perfect sense for Amazon to create ways to lure more customers into Prime membership.

While it may be a first for Amazon, it certainly isn’t the first time an ecommerce site has tried to make a spectacle out of a sales event. In China, Alibaba has been single-handedly spearheading its Annual Sales on Single’s Day – a brand new holiday pushed into public consciousness by Alibaba’s marketing department – into a nationwide online shopping craze. Last year, it even broke the global single-day ecommerce sale record with a smashing $9.3 billion (RMB 57.1 billion) in total transaction volume. If Amazon could score half the success that Alibaba has bad with Single’s Day, Prime Day may very well become a yearly event.