Was Amazon’s Prime Promo as Good as They Said?

You couldn’t avoid the headlines the past few days. Read all about it: Amazon set all kinds of records with its Prime Days promotion earlier this month, shattering sales records and causing shoppers to practically foam at the mouth trying to scoop up all the deals the online behemoth was tossing out there.

And the numbers were pretty impressive: Adobe, which I guess tracks such things, reported Amazon sales from July 8 to July 11 generated $24.1 billion in U.S. online revenue – a 30.3 percent year-over-year increase. That beat the projections of $23.8 billion. And it’s more than double the $10.8 billion that people spent on Black Friday last year, Adobe said, adding it “sets a new benchmark for the summer shopping season.”

Fair enough: I’m sure lots of people bought lots — and lots — of stuff, but buried deep in the hype was the fact that perhaps this wasn’t exactly comparing apples and apples. Maybe not even oranges either. Amazon’s comparisons were based on a four-day period from last summer when the Prime event was just two days and it added in two regular non-Prime-promo days to arrive at the four-day sales period.

Which of course causes skeptics — not to mention cynics — to wonder why this year’s increase wasn’t even bigger. Exactly how much does Amazon do on a regular summer four-day period, how much do they do on a typical single day in July and how does all of this compare to the other Prime Day promotions that seem to be proliferating like Jeff Bezos’ six-pack abs?

And what were the days just before and just after this Prime Day extravaganza like in Amazon-land? How many shoppers held off buying right before this four-day period and how many pushed up purchases on things like toothpaste and batteries that might have normally been made later in July?

Hey, I’m sure Amazon really did sell an amazing amount of stuff during these four days. But let’s not get carried away with all of this hyperbole before we better understand what it really means…something that most probably we will never truly know.

Just remember all of this when the next Amazon Prime Days promotion rolls around later this year….yeah, you know the one, the one that runs for five days.