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There was little doubt that Amazon.com's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Prime Day this year had the potential to outdo its predecessors. What began as a 20th anniversary celebration and a thank-you to Prime members has gotten bigger every year since, stretching to 48 hours in 2019, up from 36 hours in 2018, and 30 hours the year before. As in years past, Amazon touted an event that would be bigger than ever, promising a "two-day parade of epic deals."
The fifth annual event wrapped up Tuesday, and Amazon is reporting that its sales surpassed sales of both Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. Let's take a look at the highlights and see if Prime Day delivered the goods.
Image source: Amazon.
Next verse same as the first
Amazon said Prime Day was once again "the largest shopping event in Amazon history," according to its press release. The company served up more than 1 million deals for Prime members to choose from, and a record number of shoppers purchased more than 175 million items during the two-day event. Members in 18 countries shopped – double the number of countries participating in the first Prime Day.
Even better for Amazon, the company revealed that it was the biggest event ever for Amazon-branded devices. The top sellers worldwide were Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, and Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote.
The company also said it was "the biggest event ever" for a host of Alexa devices with screens, such as the Echo Show and Echo Show 5. This was also the best Prime Day ever for Fire tablets, with the Fire 7 tablet as the top seller. The company sold a record number of Kindle devices, and customers purchased two times as many Fire TV Edition Smart TVs than last year's record-setting Prime Day. Amazon also sold six times as many eero home Wi-Fi devices than during any previous sales event.
Amazon said it sold "hundreds of thousands" of Amazon devices for kids, including the Echo Dot Kids Edition, Fire 7 Kids Edition tablet, and Fire HD 8 Kids Edition tablet.
Excluding Amazon devices, the best-selling products in the U.S. were the LifeStraw Personal Water Filter, Instant Pot DUO60, and 23andMe Health + Ancestry kits.
Prime Day 2019 was also a record-breaking success for independent third-party sellers -- mostly small and medium-sized businesses. Globally, these businesses far exceeded $2 billion in sales.
Growing the rolls of Prime memberships?
Another highlight of the event: Amazon said it welcomed more new Prime members on July 15 than any other day in the company's history, and nearly as many on July 16, "making these the two biggest days ever for member signups."