Since its launch in 2015, Prime Day—Amazon’s annual shopping event that features offers exclusively available to Amazon Prime members—has grown in scope and ambition. Last year’s global sales event was celebrated in 17 countries and, according to Amazon, was its ‘biggest in history’ yet, with more than 100 million products purchased.
As the clock counts down to Prime Day 2019, it’s rumored that this year Amazon will kick off an even longer 48-hour event in a bid to further ramp up participation in its annual shopping extravaganza.
To uncover how consumers will engage on the day, Periscope by McKinsey conducted a pre-event survey exploring their attitudes to Prime Day 2019—including how they plan to shop, what they plan to purchase, and how much they plan to spend.
The research, conducted in the US, the UK, France and Germany, found that:
- 70% or more of consumers in the markets surveyed expect to participate and shop for Prime Day deals this year.
- Attitudes to this year’s event are overwhelmingly positive—66% of respondents are either excited or eager to get engaged.
- Interest in hunting down Prime Day offers on Amazon’s own branded devices, products and services is high—with Amazon Video and Music and Amazon Echo/Alexa topping one-third or more of consumers’ wish lists.
- Most consumers intend to pre-plan and research the product categories they will shop—just 21% expect to shop spontaneously on the day.
- While 30% of shoppers anticipate spending a bit more than they did last year, an enthusiastic 15% have plans to spend much more.
- A growing number of hyper-connected consumers clearly relish the ease and convenience of voice shopping—an impressive 40% or more of all consumers surveyed now ask the voice assistant Alexa to order products from Amazon.
Key Finding: Voice Shopping is on the Rise
Online Shopping Behaviors Dominate and Are Evolving—Fast
Evaluating the typical channel shopping preferences of today’s consumers, the growing dominance of online behaviors is strikingly clear to see. While the majority of consumers in all markets engaged in both online and offline (omnichannel) shopping, an impressive 30% of UK shoppers say they now exclusively or mostly shop online. Similarly, a significant number of shoppers in Germany (27%), the US (22%) and France (20%) say that online channels are their top destination when researching or making a purchase. Just 1-5% of consumers in all markets now only shop offline (in-store).
What’s more, the convenience of mobile shopping clearly exerts a particularly strong appeal for 80% or more of consumers in all markets surveyed. Indeed, 27% of US consumers admit to almost exclusively using a mobile device to make their online purchases. It was a similar story for many consumers in the UK (25%), Germany (20%), and France (17%).