Like Amazon, Walmart is adding two more days to its promotional period, which starts Tuesday and runs through July 13. The nation’s largest retailer is making its summer deals available in stores as well as online for the first time.
Here’s what to expect:
Amazon expanded Prime Day this year because shoppers “wanted more time to shop and save,” Amazon Prime Vice President Jamil Ghani recently told The Associated Press.
Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, noted that Amazon’s move to stretch the sales event to four days is a big opportunity to “really amplify and accelerate the spending velocity.”
“What we saw last year was that (shoppers) bought and then they were done, ” Schwartz said. “We know that the consumer is still really cautious. So it’s likely we could see a similar pattern where they come out early, they’re ready to buy and then they take a step back.”
Amazon executives reported in May that the company and many of its third-party sellers tried to beat big import tax bills by stocking up on foreign goods before President Donald Trump’s tariffs took effect. And because of that move, a fair number of third-party sellers hadn’t changed their pricing at that time, Amazon said.
Salesforce’s Schwartz said she’s noticed retailers becoming more precise with their discounts, such as offering promotion codes that apply to selected products instead of their entire websites.
Brett Rose, CEO of United National Consumer Supplies, a wholesale distributor of overstocked goods like toys and beauty products, thinks shoppers will go for items like beauty essentials.
“They’re going to buy more everyday items,” he said.
As in past years, Amazon offered early deals leading up to Prime Day. For the big event, Amazon said it would have special discounts on Alexa-enabled products like Echo, Fire TV and Fire tablets.
Independent businesses that sell goods through Amazon account for more than 60% of the company’s retail sales. Some third-party sellers are expected to sit out Prime Day and not offer discounts to preserve their profit margins during the ongoing tariff uncertainty, analysts said.
Rose, of United National Consumer Supplies, said he spoke with third-party sellers who said they would rather take a sales hit this week than use up a lot of their pre-tariffs inventory now and risk seeing their profit margins suffer later.
However, some independent businesses that market their products on Amazon are looking to Prime Day to make a dent in the inventory they built up earlier in the year to avoid tariffs.
Home fragrance company Outdoor Fellow, which makes about 30% of its sales through Amazon’s marketplace, gets most of its candle lids, labels, jars, reed diffusers and other items from China, founder Patrick Jones said. Fearing high costs from tariffs, Jones stocked up at the beginning of the year, roughly doubling his inventory.
For Prime Day, he plans to offer bigger discounts, such as 32% off the price of a candle normally priced at $34, Jones said.
“All the product that we have on Amazon right now is still from the inventory that we got before the tariffs went into effect,” he said. “So we’re still able to offer the discount that we’re planning on doing.”
Jones said he was waiting to find out if the order he placed in June will incur large customs duties when the goods arrive from China in a few weeks.
