Amazon said Tuesday that this year’s Prime Day will kick off on July 16 at 3 p.m. ET, with deals running for 36 hours through the following day.

That makes this year’s event the longest one in the company’s history thus far. Prime Day is Amazon’s annual sales holiday, started in 2015, which typically features deep discounts on its own devices and brands, like the Fire TV and AmazonBasics. The event also lures more paid Prime members to the platform each year, as many deals are exclusive to loyal customers.

It had already been speculated that Amazon would hold its annual shopping extravaganza on July 16, after the date was accidentally published on a banner of Amazon’s U.K. website earlier this month.

The company said Tuesday that Prime Day 2018 will feature “more than one million deals exclusively for Prime members around the world, plus select deals at all U.S. Whole Foods Market stores.” This is the first Prime Day that Amazon officially owns a grocery chain.

The e-commerce giant is known to promote its own brands and electronic devices during the event, more than anything else. Industry analysts are already expecting Prime Day 2018 to include a big push for Amazon’s more than 80 in-house labels, such as Lark & Ro, Mama Bear, Core 10 and Happy Belly.

This year, Amazon said its Prime Day will feature “double the deals on Amazon devices,” with the “biggest deals yet” on Alexa-enabled devices like the Echo. Some deals are rolling out starting Tuesday, including a $100 discount on Amazon’s Echo Show.

Amazon is also expanding Prime Day to new markets this year. In addition to the U.S., U.K., Spain, Mexico, Japan, India, Italy, Germany, France, China, Canada, Belgium and Austria, the event will now take place in Australia, Singapore, Netherlands and Luxembourg.

To drum up excitement ahead of Prime Day, Amazon said it will be shipping “giant Smile boxes” to select cities — Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Milan, Tokyo and London — this year, which hold “exciting events,” like a concert, inside. Everyone can watch the events take place online.

Amazon is calling this year’s event “the best Prime Day celebration yet.”

In turn, rival retailers like Target and J.C. Penney have started kicking off the back-to-school season even earlier to try to capture shoppers’ eyeballs as they browse deals for Prime Day on Amazon.com. It’s turning the day into another industry-wide holiday, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Last year, Amazon generated an estimated $1 billion in sales on Prime Day, according to analysis by Cowen & Co. and JPMorgan Chase. Amazon said it added “tens of millions” of Prime members to the platform overnight, which is yet another reason why the event has become so successful for the company. One goal for Amazon is to acquire new, loyal customers who will come back to shop the website again and again.

Amazon recently revealed for the first time it has more than 100 million paid Prime members globally.

Read Amazon’s full press release here.

Source: Tech CNBC
Amazon's Prime Day will run longer than ever this year, starting July 16