Amazon Prime Day Expansion of Prime Subscribers
The online retail giant Amazon entered the Indian market in 2016. India is now the world’s second-largest internet market. More than a million subscribers participated in the Prime Day event. The Amazon Prime membership brings with its Prime Music and Prime video services.
Amazon is looking to increase investment in India in a bid to transform small local businesses into the digital mode. Amazon has been making considerable forays into the Indian online shopping experience. It’s the initiative to partner with neighborhood stores all over India kickstarted on Prime Day, with 100 plus cities. Today it has a staggering 650000 sellers on its portal.
Amazon Prime Day August 6-7, 2020
India was the first market where Prime Day was held. Even in the U.S., Prime Day was moved to October. The focus of Prime Day 2020 was to integrate small businesses so that they can reach a local and global market.
Amazon offered deep discounts to Prime members on its best-selling products such as Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote, and Echo Dot, amongst others. The timing of Prime Day offers heralds the beginning of the festive season in India; one that traditionally is associated with purchases and celebrations.
The number of Alexa requests was more than a million, during Amazon Prime Day. The company mopped up twice the number of Prime subscribers in 2020 Prime Day when compared to that in 2019.
While Amazon does not disclose figures of each country subscribers, its global subscriber base is over 150 million. The target is to achieve 180 million by the end of 2020.
Small sellers over 91000 sold their products on Prime Day. In comparison, about 65000 sellers participated in Prime Day last year. This was particularly beneficial as many small businesses cleared a lot of their inventory; after months of lockdown. Nearly 97% of the country was covered in the sales made.
For about 31000 sellers, the Prime Day period recorded their best sales on Amazon. While there was a general boycott of Chinese goods, OnePlus and Xiaomi continued to be popular smartphone choices. Prime subscribers availed of many attractive discounts during the Prime Day event.
Amazon Prime membership
Amazon Prime membership is available at Rs. 999 per year or Rs. 129 per month. Some of the benefits available to Prime members include:
- Free delivery within 1 day or 2 days
- There are discounts on Morning delivery and Express Delivery
- Exclusive deal for prime subscribers
- Unlimited access to Prime Video for streaming entertainment in different languages
- Unlimited access to Prime Music
- Reading options from Kindle e-books
- Various gaming offers
Due to the pandemic, e-commerce has seen huge growth and a rise in sales. Amazon recorded nearly 37% growth in sales worldwide over the first quarter of 2020.
