Amazon Prime Big Deal Days Return this week – and the popularity of the October sales could threaten next month’s Black Friday as the main shopping day for discounts.
Amazon sellers have seen a huge increase in sales during Big Deal Days, which runs from October 8 to October 9, as Prime members get exclusive discounts and deals on a wide variety of products.
Jay Kamahi, creator of best-selling Amazon toys like the fortune-telling Mister Predicto, said his toy stores saw an increase in gross sales during the two-day event in the past few days.
Last year, his store grossed more than $47,000, compared to about $16,000 just before or immediately after the Big Deal sale.
“Everyone is looking for a deal, so when that day comes, there will be a lot of selling,” Kamhi told The Post.
Gabe Ray’s firm Evolved Commerce handles about 300 clients a month — ranging from small mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 500 companies, many of which sell on Amazon.
Ray told The Post that across the board, the average Amazon seller experienced a 250% to 350% increase in sales during the two-day event.
The October sales have been a success, especially as more consumers turned to e-tailers during the pandemic.
“More and more people of the older generation are adopting it and it has become easier to accept online shopping” – especially as Amazon has improved its same-day delivery options, Ray said.
The surge in e-commerce begs the question: Is Amazon’s October Prime event the new Black Friday?
According to experts, not at all.
Black Friday has seen a decline in popularity in recent years – from the top sales day in 2019 to second place in 2021 and 2023. According to Bain & Company’s sales forecast,
But it seems that the days of shopping frenzy are back again.
Bain expects U.S. retail sales to reach a record-breaking $75 billion during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period – representing a 5% increase from last year.
According to Bain, about 8% of total holiday sales are expected to come from Black Friday and Cyber Monday – the largest share from this period since 2019.
Although popular in their own right, Big Deal Days likely won’t replace Black Friday and Cyber Monday in terms of sales, Ray said.
But Amazon is still stealing share of Black Friday customers from brick-and-mortar stores, Ray said.
“I think they turn off some of the guys who don’t want to fight the crowd or sit and wait all night,” Ray told The Post. “It seems like brick-and-mortar deals, they’re becoming less popular.”
To encourage customers to return to stores, retailers have begun offering special, in-store deals.
And other big retailers are racing to compete with Amazon’s October program. For example, Target recently announced its Circle Week — which will run from October 6 to October 12 and overlap with the Prime event.
Kamhi told The Post that Amazon will see a surge in sales thanks to deals during the holiday season, but sellers often don’t take advantage of them.
Vendors see an increase in their gross sales during the two-day event — but their profits take a hit, as customers put off shopping in the period before and after the sale, he said.
Kamahi said that although sales from that two-day period can sometimes be enough to make up the difference, sellers are facing more and more fines from Amazon this year.
Sellers are always required to pay a fee to be included in special deals like Amazon’s Lightning Deals. But Prime-exclusive deals have long been an option for sellers who don’t want to pay extra fees, Kamhi said.
Now, he said, Amazon is forcing sellers to pay $50 for each product it wants to include in Prime-exclusive deals.
Amazon is creating an environment in which sellers depend on the online marketplace before raising fees and charging additional fees, a longtime Amazon seller said.
Recently, Amazon has offered its sellers to help with delivery costs, he said.
Previously, sellers handled shipping goods from factories in China to third-party warehouses. Then, sellers had to pay to move goods from their warehouse to the Amazon warehouse.
Now, Amazon has offered to bring sellers’ merchandise to its centers — a cost-cutting service that many sellers have come to rely on, he said.
“In the next few years, we suspect they will raise prices now that we are stuck,” Kamhi told The Post. “We’re kind of the caught customer.”
