Amazon Prime Early Access: Results + Insights

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Prime’s Early Access has come and gone, and the results are in. In today’s blog, we’ll summarize the spontaneous retail event, data points worth noting, and our takeaways to help contextualize the initiative and what it will likely mean for the rest of the holiday period across the industry. We’ve already spoken at length about Prime Early Access, so we won’t belabor that point. But to quickly recap, a special Prime Member Only sale was added to the retail calendar this year, in addition to their typical Prime Day sale, which was in early July. The idea was that this would pull forward Q4 holiday spending and give consumers a chance to shop early with significant discounts.

A BLUE CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER

However, results showed Prime Day Early Access generating not much more revenue than a typical two-day period. Bank of America analyst Justin Post estimated that the October event generated 25% less revenue than July’s Prime Day, although it was still a healthy $8 Billion. 

While the expectations were that this sale would give consumers a reason to start their holiday shopping even earlier, the reality is that most seemed to use the discounts to buy needed items at a lower cost than they could find otherwise. 

According to post-shopping polling from Numerator, only 31% of respondents were gift shoppers, while more than 50% were buying for themselves or their households. Two other noteworthy data points: 57% of item purchases were under $20, and only 4% were above $100, further indicating that shoppers were extremely budget conscious. In fact, almost 80% of Numerators respondents said their choices were impacted by inflation.

“In the first 36 hours of the Prime Early Access Sale, we saw an average order size of $46,” said Amanda Schoenbauer, a Numerator analyst. “For Prime Day [in July], the order size was closer to $60. It appears that Prime Early Access shoppers are spending less and focusing on affordable gift categories like toys and games and apparel rather than electronics and smart home devices, which are Prime Day staples.”

In addition to the lackluster financials, the sale didn’t yield as much organic interest either, as the event didn’t generate significant discussion on social media. According to Sprout Social, the Prime Early Access Sale was mentioned 90% less on Twitter than Prime Day. This may also be a factor of less clear branding for this sale than “Prime Day” naturally has and from what they’ve built up over the years. It doesn’t seem like Amazon put quite as much marketing power behind this event either, as at least anecdotally, the Adlucent team saw demonstrably less online or offline promotion for Early Access than Prime Day, which aligns with both the results and social shares.

WHAT DID ADLUCENT SEE?

To support the analysis and insights across the industry, we looked at some of our own data sources to see what we could find to support or refute the larger picture. Interestingly, our partners at GrowByData do show some fascinating insights regarding Amazon’s share of voice in the Google Search space. The data below graphs Amazon’s presence on Apparel related queries since mid-June. 

Starting with the 4th of July, Amazon drastically increased its presence on SERP (search engine results page), peaked during Prime Day(s), and carried that substantial share into August before dropping off to more average levels. This time around, for Prime Early Access, there was no real ramp-up before the event to build demand, there was a more lackluster spike for the event itself, and then they immediately dropped to even lower-than-average levels. We also saw similar trends in the data when we looked at the home furnishings category.

Looking at our data set across our retail clients, we saw no significant deviation in impressions, clicks, or CPCs (cost per click) during the two-day event. This data indicates little impact from Amazon’s push. Additionally, other retailers in the space didn’t react strongly either, despite efforts like Walmart’s sale happening simultaneously with the Early Access event. We also saw that consumers weren’t comparison shopping on Google for products they found on Amazon as we have seen for past Prime Days.

Prime early access TAKEAWAYS

So what do these Amason Prime Early Access results mean? And how should we be thinking about these types of events from Amazon, especially if they run them outside of Prime Day in the future?

• Amazon won’t release sales data, but multiple 3P sources report considerably lower sales than Prime Day in July. Although Amazon has proven it has the power to generate a retail holiday out of thin air in the past, this event proved there is a limit to that power. The current macroeconomic factors and consumer trepidation may be too much even for Amazon to overcome in a pronounced way.
• Consumers spent less on average and were shopping more for themselves than actual gifting and holiday buying. Consumers still have a lot of uncertainty about what their gifting budgets will look like and what the rest of the year holds. Take this as an early indicator of softened holiday demand unless there are considerable improvements in the larger economy.
• The duality of some shoppers jumping on good deals and others having to pass them up points to a continued split in American shoppers’ financial well-being. Rising inflation continues to hurt those with less disposable income and fewer savings much worse than top earners, and we expect that to continue through the holidays. This means that successful marketing campaigns need to be tailored towards that split and differentiating value vs discounts.

Although sales may have been lackluster at only $8 Billion, it was successful for Amazon because there was little cost to the ecommerce giant to run the event. Most discounts were passed on to the sellers, and as a result, Amazon was able to steal overall wallet share from budget-conscious consumers in Q4. Moreover, they freed up warehouse space and spread out their logistics load by pulling purchasing forward. This is a significant win, given some of the supply chain and logistics issues most retailers have seen over the last year.

Conclusion

If you want to talk more about what this might mean for your business and particular vertical and how Adlucent can help ensure your Amazon and Google Shopping marketing strategies are incorporating these types of learnings on the fly, reach out to our team today!
The holiday shopping season is upon us. Is your digital retail marketing strategy ready? Download our 2022 Holiday Strategy Forecast Report today, and check out the other blogs in this year’s holiday series!

Sources

• Ad Week
• Digital Commerce 360
• Insider Intelligence

MEET THE AUTHORS

Adlucent

Adlucent is the performance marketing agency that proves outperformance has no limit. Powered by our purpose-built platform, Deep Search™, Adlucent unifies the best of human and machine for a scientific approach to marketing. We work transparently in partnership with B2C and B2B retailers and brands to create custom, predictive programs that drive ever-better outcomes. Our services include paid search, shopping, social, retail media networks, display media, video, performance creative, consulting, and measurement. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adlucent is part of Advantage Solutions and ranked one of the top marketing companies in the U.S. by AdAge.