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For Prime Day, Amazon puts its latest shopping tech forward

Alexa, live shopping and Buy with Prime are all involved in the two-day deals event.

For Prime Day, Amazon puts its latest shopping tech forward

Alexa, find the deals. (Photo by Nicolas J Leclercq on Unsplash)

What you do on the day when everyone’s watching can say a lot about what you value. It can also point to where you’re heading next.

That’s true for Amazon Prime Day, which is a two-day event this year that began on Tuesday and runs through July 13. The annual sales extravaganza is a bonafide ecommerce holiday, as brands and retailers from across the landscape use the occasion to get the attention of a shopping public that is on the lookout for an online bargain.

The focus is first and foremost on all of the deals that are flowing in, and how sales are performing.

With one business day nearly complete on the East Coast, consumer insights firm Numerator offered some early numbers from its 2022 Live Prime Day Tracker. Here are a few insights so far, according to Numerator data updated at 4 p.m. EST on July 12:

  • Order size: Average Prime Day order value so far this year was $52.22, while 46% of households placed orders for two or more items.
  • Popular items: Items like Fire TV Sticks, Echo Dot 4th Gens and Frito-Lay Variety Packs are the most popular orders on the day at Amazon, per Numerator, while household essentials gained the highest category share with 36% of items purchased.
  • Inflation’s impact: The survey results show inflation impacted 83% of shoppers, with 73% of shoppers who shopped both this year and last spending the same amount or less. This comes with the caveat that there’s still time to spend more.

The latest in shopper experience

Along with offering deals and signing up new Prime members, Amazon has used the occasion of its own holiday to test and grow new shopping features. Here’s a look at a few that we’ve spotted:

Voice

Alexa-powered devices aren’t only some of the top selling items on Prime Day. The voice technology is also a key part of Amazon’s efforts to let folks know about the deals being offered. On newer Echo devices, Amazon allows users to enable deal alerts. As opposed to needing to stare at the short-term Lightning Deals page for hours in hopes of the right find, this feature provides alerts that tell a user when an item in their cart, wish list or saved-for-later file goes on sale. While it’s especially useful for Prime Day, the company rolled this out for use anytime to all members earlier this year.

Live shopping

Amazon Live is the company’s answer to QVC for the influencer age. It is getting lots of use for Prime Day. In the run-up to the event, Amazon featured chats with celebrities like Kevin Hart, Australian model Miranda Kerr and actress Kyle Richards. During the event, influencers like Porsha Williams, Paige DeSorbo and JoJo Fletcher are going live to chat about the deals they’re seeing. As Techcrunch pointed out, Amazon’s livestreaming strategy is also a creator-forward strategy. Gen Z shoppers tend to trust creators over more traditional advertising, and livestreaming is one way to connect.

Buy With Prime

As MarketPlace Pulse pointed out, Amazon’s recently-unveiled service that embeds Amazon Prime’s shipping and delivery guarantees on websites beyond Amazon.com is also making a Prime Day appearance on the websites of a few merchants. Amazon has also curated a selection of the deals offered by these DTC brands. While a small experiment, these are the first time official Prime Day deals are available outside Amazon. In effect, it means the company’s reach is even extending to the halo sales events.

Another Prime Day

Perhaps the biggest innovation in Prime Day for 2022 is that there are expected to be two big deals events. After this summer Prime Day concludes, the cycle is poised to start over again for a Prime Fall event, CNBC and others have reported. For brands and sellers, it means there will be a chance to keep the momentum from this event going, and apply learnings quickly.


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