Yesterday we published a chart showing the massive Amazon Prime Day growth over the past 10 years. Starting from around 34.4 million items sold on Prime Day in 2015, it’s likely that Prime Day in 2024 will exceed 400 million items sold once India holds it’s Prime Day later this summer.
But this chart doesn’t tell the entire story – since 2015 Prime Day growth has been diluted by extending the sales period from 24 hours to 30, then 36 and now 48 hours. Plus the number of countries has expanded from 9 in 2015 to 24 in 2024 (there were 25 countries taking part in 2023, but China is no longer part of Prime Day).
With a massively longer sales period, and ever more countries participating, is Prime Day growth dependent on simply having more people purchasing over a longer period of time, or is there genuine growth? We wanted to find out so we looked deeper into the numbers.
We took the known (or estimated) total number of sales for each of the past 10 Prime Days and divided it by the number of country sites taking part and divided again by the number of hours that Prime Day ran for in each year. Then to get small numbers (rather than working in millions) we converted into sales per second. It’s worth noting again that India is yet to hold their 2024 Prime Day so this year’s numbers will only increase.
The chart above shows the number of country sites taking part in each of the past 10 Prime Days on the left axis, and sales per second on the right. When looking at the data, back in 2015 each country site on average produced 44 sales per second and today in 2024 we see a record breaking ~96 sales per second.
In 2018, Amazon Prime Day growth had a bad year with sales dropping back to an average of 45 sales per second per country, but since then growth has accelerated and shows no signs of slowing down. This year, even with India yet to come and China no longer included, Amazon Prime Day growth is still smashing records making it the premier sales event in the West.
