Amazon May Move Prime Day to Late June

Amazon plans to hold its annual Prime Day sale a month earlier, scheduling it for late June this year rather than July as it did last year, Bloomberg reported Thursday (March 12), citing unnamed sources.

Reached by PYMNTS, Amazon declined to comment on the report.

The change will impact both the company’s third-party vendors and its competitors, who often schedule their own events or promotions around the same time, according to the report.

It will also affect Amazon’s financial reporting by placing the event in the second quarter rather than the third, per the report.

Last year’s Prime Day event, which was held July 8-11, delivered greater sales and savings over its four days than any other four-day period that included a Prime Day event, Amazon said in a press release issued the day after the event.

Independent sellers on the platform also achieved record sales and a record number of items sold, according to the release.

“This year’s extended Prime Day event delivered incredible savings to our members across millions of deals,” Doug Herrington, CEO of Amazon Worldwide Stores, said in the July release. “We’re thrilled to see record savings for our customers, who found great prices on the everyday essentials and products they love.”

While Amazon did not provide dollar figures for the sale, figures from Adobe Analytics, cited by Reuters, showed online spending among U.S. retailers jumping 30%, or $24.1 billion, during the four-day stretch that coincided with Prime Day.

Last year’s Prime Day sale was the first to run for four days instead of the usual two. It was also the first to include “Today’s Big Deals,” which Amazon described as “themed daily deal drops” exclusive to Prime members.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Speed Versus Spend: Who Shopped Amazon and Walmart’s Deal Days and Why” found that there was a fast-growing customer segment who shopped both sales events: Amazon’s Prime Day and Walmart’s Walmart+ Week, which ran April 28 to May 4 and was a members-only event.

Shoppers participating in both events drove most of the growth in participation in those events, according to the report.