With all of the promotion Amazon does around its mid-summer Prime Day event, many consumers map out their shopping strategy—much as they do for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
But a good portion of shoppers threw those plans out the window, succumbing to impulse purchases across a number of categories, according to fresh data published by A.T.Kearny. In the management consulting firm’s Post-Amazon Prime Day Survey, 1,001 consumers revealed how they engaged with the July 16-17 spectacle.
During the Prime Day event, Amazon hogged 70 percent of total apparel market share, and grabbed 75 percent of the footwear market. Though electronics (29 percent) saw the greatest activity during the sale, apparel and footwear, combined, accounted for the second-most purchased category, with 23 percent.
Some Prime Day deals were just too tempting to ignore, according to A.T.Kearny. Two out of every five shoppers (40 percent) checked out with apparel in their cart that they hadn’t planned to buy, and shoes drove impulse purchases for 36 percent. For 37 percent, the markdowns were simply too enticing, but another 25 percent claimed to be “independently browsing the website” when they encountered a desirable discounted product.
What’s more, Prime Day encouraged people to shop and spend—even if that didn’t happen on Amazon. Twenty percent of those who purchased elsewhere did so because the offer was better than what Amazon had available, and for 17 percent the pricing or promotion was equivalent. Another 17 percent said Amazon didn’t have what they were looking for, leaving them with no choice but to buy from a competitor.
There’s good news for Amazon, however: 83 percent said the price was reduced on most or all of the products they searched for. Just 2 percent were out of luck, coming up “empty-handed” on discounted items of interest.
Amazon’s highly publicized Prime Day website crash had varying effects on shoppers’ purchasing plans. Nearly a quarter (24 percent) cited the crash as a major disruption that short-circuited their shopping agenda and led to lower spending than they’d intended. The site failure was a minor hiccup for 30 percent, who came back to Amazon when the issue was resolved and were able to buy everything on their lists. Another 30 percent expressed that they were unaffected by the outage—whether that’s because they didn’t attempt to access the site during the crash is unknown. Regardless, this group was able to shop the sale successfully. Some 16 percent didn’t even know that Amazon.com had crashed.