It looks like Amazon’s fourth-annual Prime Day will kick off on July 16.
The date’s not official, mind you; rather, TWICE’s fast-thinking sister site, TechRadar, spotted what may have been an inadvertent announcement on an Amazon U.K. page.
The banner has since been taken down, but not before it was captured by the CE advice site. The notice declared a noontime start to the day-and-a-half-long global sales promotion, which is limited to Amazon Prime members only.
Amazon launched Prime Day three years ago to help mark the company’s 20th anniversary. It has since gone on to break Amazon sales records, despite past customer critiques of flotsam-and-jetsam-like sale items that suggested a pre-holiday housecleaning.
See: Amazon Responds To Prime Day Disses
According to a survey commissioned by RetailMeNot, the cash-back and coupon-code shopping site, consumers plan to spend an average of $167 on Prime Day this year, with $70 of that going toward back-to-school items.
What’s more, the company’s internal data shows that Prime Day had a halo effect on other e-tailers. Traffic on their RetailMeNot pages was up more than 30 percent last year when Prime- or Black-Friday-in-July-themed promotions were proffered, and Prime Day became the site’s biggest online shopping day of the third quarter, up from 21st place in 2016.
This year, 60 percent of merchants plan to run Prime Day-related promotions, according to a separate retailer survey.
“Prime Day is a huge opportunity for all retailers,” observed RetailMeNot chief marketing officer Marissa Tarleton. “This relatively new shopping holiday has quickly become the kickoff for the back-to-school shopping season. In both sales and opportunity, this day is transformative not just for Amazon but for all retailers savvy enough to capitalize on it.”
She added, “We expect Prime Day to rise in the rankings again this year with the potential to rival the popularity of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”
