Amazon Reports Record Prime Day Sales And Subscriber Growth

Smaller retailers are finding that their best chance for success is to sell through Amazon’s retail ecosystem. Startups and small businesses are finding that they can see healthy growth by becoming Amazon suppliers and partners.

In its Prime Day announcement, Amazon highlighted several startups and small businesses that did very well by participating in Prime Day, including one that saw its business grow 500 times over. Amazon said that other companies that participated in Prime Day saw record breaking sales.

All of this translates into an evolving plan to dominate retail sales by driving retail competitors out of business unless they are partners with Amazon in one way or another.

Amazon growth

Small retailers and producers of retail goods can do very well if they sell through Amazon and perhaps even better if they hand off their warehouse and fulfillment processes to Amazon as well so that their products are eligible for Amazon Prime.

The big stumbling block for Amazon is Walmart, which despite Amazon’s best efforts is still the largest retailer. Walmart is showing no signs of giving in.

To compete with Amazon, Walmart acquired one of its competitors, online retailer Jet. Following the acquisition, Walmart began to combine the operations of the two companies and to change the way in which Walmart does business in the e-commerce world. This has aligned the company and its e-commerce divisions including Jet to do battle with Amazon, while also having access to Walmart’s vast resources.

But what both Walmart and Jet have failed to realize is that the real goal for Amazon isn’t just about sales. Amazon is working to become indispensable to consumers world-wide. The record number of sales of Echo devices is just as important to Amazon as anything else that happened on Prime Day with the possible exception of the record number of households signing up for Prime.

The idea is to make Amazon the only place where consumers think to shop. Instead of getting in the car and running over to Walmart, Amazon wants them to ask their Echo device to get it for them.

If those consumers know that the price for whatever they want to buy will be competitive, and that they can get the product they want in a timely manner, then they won’t need to fight traffic to get to Walmart; they won’t need to fight crowds inside of Walmart; and they won’t have to wait in lines when they leave.

Instead, all the consumer needs to do is ask and the item they want will appear at their door. Any friction between desire and purchase will vanish and unless Walmart does a brilliant job with its e-commerce efforts it will be left wondering what happened to its business.

Amazon’s goal is well along, depending on where you are. Monday evening as Prime Day began, I asked Alexa, which was running on my Amazon Echo, to order a black Echo Dot. It appeared on my desk minutes ago. Not quite instant gratification, but pretty close.

Originally published on eWeek

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