Amazon to launch new global shopping event “Prime Day” at midnight on 15 July to rival Black Friday
Amazon is hoping to stir up the same shopping frenzy as Black Friday by launching of new global shopping day next week with hundreds of promotional deals.
The online retail giant is turning 20 years old next week and as part of its celebrations it will launch Prime Day at midnight on 15 July, which it claims will offer “more deals than Black Friday” exclusively for Prime members.
The US-style shopping event, which follows Thanksgiving and was so-called because it marked the point in the year when retailers broke into the black, was the busiest shopping day of the year last year, with around £810m spent online according to IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.
Prime Day will work much like Black Friday, with “lightning deals” – which last until either the time for that promotion or the product runs out – added throughout the day and new products added every ten minutes from toys to gardening tools and electronics.
Amazon is of course trying to lure more customers to sign up to Prime, and so the company is offering non-Prime members £20 off a year’s membership £59.
“We’re offering Prime members thousands of deals on Prime Day. In fact, in the UK we are offering more than double the number of deals that we offered last Black Friday,” said Christopher North, Managing Director at Amazon UK.
“Prime started as a One-Day Delivery benefit on a few million items back in 2007. Since then we’ve increased selection to 10 million eligible items for fast Prime delivery and added unlimited streaming movies and TV episodes, unlimited cloud photo storage, access to 800,000 Kindle books and just last week we launched one-hour delivery exclusively for Prime members in selected London postcodes.”
Prime members in the US, the UK, Spain, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Canada, and Austria will have access to the event.