Prime Day Stats: Amazon's 36 Hours of Deals by the Numbers

Prime Day, Amazon’s biggest day of the year, started Monday at 3 p.m. Eastern and didn’t end until 3 a.m. Wednesday for those on the East Coast. This year’s Amazon Prime Day featured 36 hours of deals on everything from electronics to food. But now that the dust has settled, the question remains: How much did Amazon’s biggest event actually make this year?

Even though Amazon kept crashing for a lot of people trying to shop on Prime Day 2018, to no one’s surprise, it was still the biggest shopping event in Amazon history, according to a press release provided to Inverse. The press release doesn’t include exact numbers (Amazon doesn’t generally reveal its Prime Day revenue stats), but the stats it does include are pretty impressive.

Prime Day 2018 by the Numbers

Amazon Prime members worldwide bought more than 100 million products during Prime Day, the press release said. Some of the best sellers across the globe were the Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote and the Echo Dot.

Sales for this year’s Prime Day surpassed Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and the previous Prime Day when comparing 36-hour periods, Amazon reports. In particular, small- and medium-sized businesses selling on Amazon more than exceeded $1 billion in sales on Prime Day 2018.

Despite website error snafus, Amazon Prime Day sales were actually up 89 percent in the first 12 hours from last year, CNBC reported Tuesday. And orders were up 69 percent compared to the first 12 hours of Prime Day 2017.

However, CNBC’s Courtney Reagan noted on Twitter Wednesday that while Amazon claims Prime members bought some 100 million products during Prime Day this year, in 2017, the company said Prime Day sales were up 60 percent versus Prime Day 2016, making for “different metrics (on purpose) so we can’t compare 2018 to 2017 exactly.”

Prime Day 2018 Takeaways

RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney told Reuters that Amazon probably made between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in revenue from this year’s Prime Day, and that gross merchandise value likely topped $3.5 billion.

One particular highlight: Amazon reports that July 17 was the biggest sales day for smart home devices in its history, with over a million devices sold for Prime Day.

Some activists hoped that a planned Amazon strike would impact Prime Day’s bottom line, as Amazon workers in Europe went on strike during Prime Day to try to draw attention to working conditions such as proposed wage cuts and health benefits, and some consumers boycotted Amazon and its subsidiaries in solidarity.

But so far, it sounds like Amazon’s Prime Day stats are pretty impressive, and it doesn’t appear that the strike had much of a measurable impact on Prime Day 2018 numbers.