Amazon courts sales with annual “Prime Day” event

Global Business

FILE- In this Dec. 20, 2017, file photo, Prime Now customer orders are ready for delivery at the Amazon warehouse in New York. Same-day delivery promises the convenience of online ordering with nearly the same immediacy of store buying. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

For the fourth year in a row, Amazon aims to boost sales during the sluggish summer months with “Prime Day” – or rather “Prime Days”- extending the event to 48 hours.

There are deals on more than a million items exclusively for the more than 100 million shoppers who pay to join Amazon’s Prime service.

CGTN’s Jim Spellman reports.

 

“Prime Day has become an event. I think it has become a retail phenomenon. It’s only been a few years, and I think their goal was originally to build prime membership, and I think that more and more people are seeing it as a great day to shop,” Marlene Morris Towns, Professor of Marketing at Georgetown University

Other retailers including Best Buy and Walmart are fighting for a piece of the action — matching prices and launching their own sales to coincide with Prime Day.

Amazon Prime launched in 2005 and initially focused on fast shipping. It has since expanded to include music, video, grocery delivery and more available via Amazon’s digital devices.

“I think Prime tends to be the glue that holds all that together. There is this Amazon ecosystem and the more convenient everything becomes the less you have to think about it and the more people will spend and will do more of their shopping within Amazon.” said Towns.

There is added pizzazz for Prime Day this year, with celebrity endorsements from Mark Wahlberg and others plus a Taylor Swift concert broadcast on the company’s streaming video service.

But not everyone was singing Amazon’s praises. Protesters demonstrated against the company and its CEO Jeff Bezos. They object to Amazon’s huge carbon footprint, difficult conditions for workers and the company’s contracts with controversial U.S. government agencies involved in detaining migrants along the U.S. border.


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CGTN’s Rachelle Akuffo spoke with Sucharita Kodali, retail analyst at Forrester Research about Amazon’s growth and concerns over its labor practices.