With Amazon Prime Day 2019 having kicked off yesterday, Monday, July 15, and running for 48 hours until today, July 16, and with new deals launching as often as every five minutes with two days of more than a million deals worldwide reserved exclusively for Prime members, it is making 2019 its biggest sales event to date.
Scurri is a cloud-based carrier management platform for online retailers, enabling them to provide their customers with a fast, convenient and innovative shopping experience. Every year, the SaaS provider helps simplify deliveries for more than five million UK eBay customers. UK retailers using Scurri include Gousto, VisionDirect, GymShark, Fetch and Fabled (by Marie Claire).
Scurri knows that 250 other online retailers are planning to compete with Prime Day this year. Those brands will need to be extremely creative in the incentives they offer to customers and also ensure they have the necessary delivery processes in place to reap the benefits of this mega-sale.
I believe that the attraction for consumers to Prime Membership is not only the free and speedy delivery options but also the innovative technology of the Amazon Home devices and the services they’re linked to, all of which blends to provide an enhanced level of convenience to the customer. Those shoppers who couldn’t wait until July 15, were able to get early access to selected deals on devices via Shop with Alexa on an Echo device.
In many ways, Amazon has shaped the entire eCommerce industry by selling next level convenience. Convenience is what drives Amazon’s innovation in tech (AI, voice recognition, personalisation) and continued investment in delivery infrastructure and is what keeps the rest of us on our toes. The retail giant is almost completely responsible for creating the two-day shipping expectation in customers. And as a result, completely raised the bar in terms of eCommerce consumer service and the need for a much faster and reliable delivery turnaround. The April announcement that it will roll out one-day shipping for Prime members builds on that and that’s without mentioning the imminent Drone deliveries as they further extend their span for peak convenience.
At last year’s Prime Day, Amazon came under fire for the technical issues they had when both the app and the site crashed, people also complained about the navigation and findability of the deals online, but despite that they reportedly sold 100 million products and proclaimed 2019 as its biggest sale to date. The result of which was the mainstream uptake of its home devices that link to its services in more homes than ever. If that doesn’t look like success, I’m not sure what does.