Amazon Spotlights Small Business Vendors in Prime Day Promo, Offers $10 Credit
Amazon gave a nod to small businesses Monday, blogging in its widely anticipated Prime Day announcement (see 2009210057) it will offer Prime members a $10 credit to use during the two-day sales event, Oct. 13-14, if they spend $10 on items sold by select small businesses before then. The same offer applies at Amazon-owned Whole Foods, which emailed customers Monday saying they can earn a $10 credit for Prime Day by buying $10 worth of goods in stores through Oct. 12. A section on Amazon.com urging customers to support small retail businesses breaks out vendors by category.
“Supporting small businesses is more important than ever” this year, said Amazon. It's funding the promotion “to connect customers with small businesses selling in our stores,” it said. Third-party sellers, mostly small and midsize businesses that make up about 60% of physical product sales on Amazon.com, “have created an estimated 2.2 million jobs, and are growing sales faster than our own retail sales,” it said.
CozyPhones, a maker of headbands with built-in speaker drivers, was a featured small business electronics seller Monday. An Amazon spokesperson emailed that small business products included in the promotion "are owned and sold exclusively from US brand owners and artisans." Responding to our question on criteria used to define a small business, she said Amazon commonly uses Gartner's definition. That includes an organization with fewer than 100 employees, less than $50 million in annual revenue and "highly constrained" IT resources.
Amazon will spend more than $100 million on promotions to help small businesses around the world “increase their sales and reach new customers,” it said. Globally, Turkey and Brazil signed on for Prime Day for the first time this year, joining the U.K., United Arab Emirates, Spain, Singapore, Netherlands, Mexico, Luxembourg, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, China, Canada, Belgium, Austria and Australia. The 48-hour event begins Oct. 13 at midnight PDT and runs through the next day.
Amazon expanded Prime Day tie-ins to its various businesses. Alexa has a bigger role this year, the company said: Customers who aren’t Prime members can earn $5 to spend on Prime Day by signing up for membership via Alexa. Deals will be available at Amazon physical stores including Whole Foods and Amazon 4-star, Books, Pop Up and Fresh. Amazon will make a donation for items bought through Amazon Smile, which will have all the same deals as the standard e-commerce site.
Some shopping strategies differ with Prime Day being so close to Black Friday this year, emailed Michael Bonebright, DealNews analyst. “Many popular products that sell out on Prime Day may still be on backorder when Black Friday rolls around,” he said. Consumers should “shop on Prime Day if you're concerned about getting a specific product in time for Christmas.”
Prime Day is “the best time to shop Amazon” for the rest of the year, said Bonebright. In years past, Amazon has repeated Prime Day prices on Black Friday, but “with so many shipping problems happening in 2020, you're much more likely to receive your order in a timely fashion if you shop on Prime Day instead of waiting,” he advised: “You can always shop elsewhere on Black Friday.”
Prime Day isn’t a great shopping day for products that compete with Amazon gear, said Bonebright: “Amazon likes to showcase new products from Marketplace brands during Prime Day -- and the brands pay a pretty penny for this advertising,” he said. “However, these products are unlikely to actually be on sale.” An exception was Prime Day 2019, which turned out to be “a great time to buy an Apple Watch,” he said, “but the other Apple deals were unremarkable.”