Amazon said Wednesday that this year’s Prime Day topped its previous record.
That compares with last year, when Amazon said sales grew more than 60 percent during the event, breaking a record at the time and surpassing Amazon’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined. The company had also added “tens of millions of Prime members” to its platform — helping it surpass 100 million people for the first time earlier this year.
2018 marked the longest Prime Day yet for Amazon. The mega-deals event got its start in 2015 and has grown longer, from 30 hours in 2017 to a 36-hour window this time around.
It was also the first Prime Day that Amazon owned Whole Foods, which has been touting its own deals throughout the week and offered shoppers $10 to spend on Amazon if they spent $10 on groceries.
Industry analysts had been anticipating Amazon could ring up at least $3.6 billion in sales globally through midnight Tuesday.
A series of glitches on Amazon’s website Monday around 3 p.m. ET stalled many users from purchasing items or searching deals right away. But an early report said Prime Day sales on Amazon’s third-party marketplace were up nearly 90 percent during the first 12 hours of the event from a year ago. (In 2017, Prime Day kicked off at 9 p.m. ET.)
Some of the best deals this year were on Amazon’s own electronic devices, like the Echo and Fire TV Stick. The Instant Pot was another hot seller. Many of Amazon’s in-house brands, for everything from coffee to clothes and furniture, were also discounted heavily.
Amazon said late in the day Tuesday that small- and medium-sized businesses globally had already exceeded more than $1 billion in sales. (CNBC also this week reported on Amazon sellers who say they were unfairly suspended before Prime Day.)
Retailers competing with Amazon have also been trying to soak up some sales this week, offering their own deals events online. Target, which had a one-day sale running on its website, said Tuesday was the “highest single day of traffic and sales of 2018” online so far for the company.
Shares of Amazon, which has a market capitalization of nearly $895 billion, were trading up less than 1 percent premarket Wednesday, after hitting an all-time intraday high of $1,851.69 on Tuesday. The stock is up about 80 percent from a year ago.
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Amazon says this Prime Day was its biggest shopping event ever