Amazon’s Fulfillment Facelift Put to the Test on Prime Big Deal Days
The autumn installment of Amazon Prime Day—recently rebranded to Prime Big Deal Days—will return Oct. 10-11, with the e-commerce giant likely to be shipping out orders at its fastest pace ever.
The 48-hour event will take place in 19 countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain and Sweden. Prime members in Japan can shop the event later in the month at an undisclosed date.
More from Sourcing Journal
Amazon said it will offer new deals as often as every five minutes on a wide selection of products.
Prime members can opt in to receive personalized deal-alert notifications related to their recent Amazon searches and items they’re looked at and saved in the recent past.
“We’re giving our Prime members yet another way to save, with deals on some of the most wanted gifts of the season,” said Jamil Ghani, vice president of Amazon Prime in a statement. “Members can shop deals across categories like fashion, home, and toys that include some of our most popular items during Prime Big Deal Days. They can also take advantage of other exciting Prime member benefits, like shopping favorite brands beyond Amazon.com with Buy with Prime and accessing doorbuster deals with Invite-only deals.”
Like the July Prime Day event, members can use a small business search filter to support brands and artisans selling on Amazon’s marketplaces.
The sale event is another of the many perks of the $139 per year Prime membership program, which includes free, two-day delivery and access to streaming services. Amazon hasn’t publicly stated its membership count since 2021, when founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos said the company had 200 million global Prime subscribers.
Amazon’s fulfillment network has undergone a bit of a facelift since last year’s Prime Big Deal Days event, shifting to a regionalized operation to cut costs and delivery times. Amazon operates 48 sub-same-day delivery facilities that fulfill orders in less than five hours after customers hit the buy button, according to MWPVL International, which expects the footprint to triple in the near future.
In a July 31 blog post, Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, detailed how Amazon was delivering “its largest selection of products to U.S. Prime members at the fastest speeds ever.” At the time, Herrington said the Everything Store had delivered more than 1.8 billion units to U.S. Prime members the same or next day—nearly quadrupling 2019 totals.
Same-day delivery is available to customers in more than 90 U.S. metro areas, Amazon said.
This means the continued reshuffling of Amazon’s fulfillment deck could mean a faster delivery experience for the latest Prime sale event.
Amazon also recently launched Supply Chain by Amazon to offer third-party seller partners new flexibility.
The new set of services enables Amazon to pick up inventory from third-party sellers’ manufacturing facilities, ship it across borders, handle customs clearance and ground transportation, store inventory in bulk, manage replenishment across Amazon and other sales channels, and deliver directly to the customer. This adds value to the SMBs selling products during Prime Big Deal Days.
Walmart and Target, which usually stage their own sales to compete with Prime Day and similar events, haven’t yet announced dates for their respective Rollbacks and More Savings Event and Deal Days.
Prime Big Deal Days arrives amid uncertain consumer demand as the 2023 holiday season approaches. Considered by some as the start of holiday spending, Prime Big Deal Days could face a tough climate, as Coresight Research expects just low-single-digit total nominal retail sales growth in the fourth quarter.
Amazon is preparing third-party sellers for higher holiday demand. The company told third-party sellers to get their holiday inventory into its fulfillment network by Oct. 26 so they’re ready for potential spikes on Black Friday.
Prime Day already served as the rising tide that raised all boats in July. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, total e-commerce sales in the U.S. increased 10.3 percent that month, ahead of just a 3.2 percent spike in total retail and food service sales.
Amazon said that July 11, the first day of Prime Day, was its highest grossing sales day ever. During the two-day sale, more than 375 million items were purchased globally with $2.5 billion-plus saved on deals.
