Over this year’s two-day Prime Day event, we were busy crawling the web to gather data and draw insights that can help brands perform better online. How?
Our robust data collection platform crawls thousands of ecommerce sites in real time, gathering information about products, placement, promotion and the buyer’s path to purchase. That data then delivers actionable insights brands can use to optimize the customer experience, drive more purchases and protect their brand integrity across every sales channel.
Here’s what we found over the July 11-12 Prime Day event, and why brands who want to increase conversions should take a closer look at their own Prime Day data:
More eyes doesn’t always mean more buys
Compared to 2022’s Prime Days, PriceSpider’s overall traffic to Amazon doubled over the retail holiday this year. But a closer look at the data tells us something important to remember when driving brand growth: just because there are more eyes on your products, it doesn’t mean there will automatically be more conversions on them. Let’s take a closer look at why:
Year over year from an industry perspective, we saw Prime Day pet product traffic double, healthy and beauty traffic triple and consumer electronics traffic quadruple. But it’s crucial to note that two, three or even four times the traffic didn’t necessarily equate to double the sales.
Even though overall Prime day traffic (aka shopping) and sales were on the rise, conversions decreased. But why? It’s safe to assume that shoppers only pulled the trigger and made an Amazon purchase when the value of the Prime deal was notably significant—and actually a real deal. According to How-To Geek, some of the Prime Day deals that third-party sellers and brands offer may not be what they seem. They note that “The single best thing [shoppers] can do when sifting through Prime Day deals is to check the price history of items. This strategy will catch a lot of fake deals on Amazon, even beyond Prime Day.”
Because savvy shoppers and price history checking tools have the power to expose these “faux discounts”, brands who want to win and keep customers should invest in ecommerce solutions like PriceSpider’s Where to Buy to ensure their products and pricing are consistent across marketplaces, other sellers and retailers over time.
Inflation doesn’t have to burst your brand’s bubble
Now that we’ve seen what the Prime Day traffic looked like, let’s take a closer look at how that traffic converted. Our data tells us that pet supplies and lawn/garden/patio sales had a 34% increase in average order value (AOV) with no increase in transaction counts. Additionally, products in the toys & games, housewares and health & beauty categories saw incremental year-over-year AOV growth, ticking up 8%, 17% and +19%, respectively.
AOV is calculated from the total sales divided by number of transactions. So if transactions didn’t increase, we know the increase in basket value is coming from either higher pricing on products purchased or more items being purchased (or a blend of both). The insight: if your order values are going up but overall transactions are going down, you obviously have fewer customers—but the ones you do have are spending more money.
This is likely the effect of inflation, where a minority of shoppers have more disposable income than the masses. And while an increase in basket size is certainly a good thing for brands and retailers, a decline in converting customers is not.
The data here surfaces the need to analyze product price points, see how conversion differs as they fluctuate, and narrow down the sweet spot to attract more shoppers in today’s economy. Once you optimize pricing across marketplaces, you can win both sides of the equation: bargain shoppers and those with money to spend. PriceSpider’s Brand Monitor can help you do just that.
Even on Prime Day, brick-and-mortar is still in play
Our data showed that the household goods & grocery industry experienced a minimal Prime Day impact, which is to be expected when retailers like Target and Walmart run their own competitive sales days to align with Amazon’s—oftentimes delivering more significant cost/value impact within the CPG realm. For example, our data showed that Walmart and Chewy have successfully grown their Prime Day traffic share over time, averaging an 8% and 3% increase on Prime Days, respectively. When shoppers are simply looking for the best value (as they are wont to do in times of inflation and economic uncertainty), Amazon becomes the lower-tiered choice when compared to the immediacy of local BOPIS or other delivery options.
Remember: digital commerce strategy is different from brick-and-mortar, but both offer unique retail insights. Blending both digital and in-person shopping strategies will help you construct a more robust picture of your buyer, which can then inform your marketing segmentation opportunities.
Invest in understanding your Prime Day performance and beyond
Armed with the data to make better product and marketing decisions, 60% of our customers performed better this Prime Day than last year. If you’re not already asking questions like this of your data, your brand may be falling behind the competition:
- Where did your brand’s Prime Day performance fall amongst your competitors?
- How significant were the gaps across your clicks, sales, transactions and purchase rate?
- Did your customers convert on their selected products or did they shop within your brand?
- Which of your competitors did you lose to in the basket? Was the differentiator price or availability?
- If you ran marketing campaigns, what was the volume increase against your brand’s baseline performance?
They say knowledge is power, and that’s certainly true for brands who invest in robust data collection strategies. Ready to find out what your Prime Day (and everyday) data is trying to tell your brand? PriceSpider is here to help you untangle it all. Contact us now to get started.
