Amazon says Prime Day will be annual event

Amazon says its Prime Day sale led to a sales surge and “hundreds of thousands” of new signups for its $99 annual Prime loyalty program. The company said it plans to make the sale an annual event. Amazon promoted Wednesday’s sale, which is tied to its 20th anniversary, for weeks by saying there would be more deals than during the busy winter holiday shopping season. Some shoppers took to social media and elsewhere to complain about the types of sales they were seeing and their limited nature. Nonetheless, Amazon said Thursday that in the U.S. and nine countries around the world that offer the Prime program, shoppers ordered 398 items per second, surpassing the rate of ordering on Black Friday, the busy shopping day after Thanksgiving.

Going into this, we weren’t sure whether Prime Day would be a one-time thing or if it would become an annual event. After yesterday’s results, we’ll definitely be doing this again.

Greg Greeley, Amazon Prime vice president

Amazon said worldwide order growth more than quadrupled over the same day last year, which is typically a sluggish sales day, and rose 18 percent more than Black Friday 2014. In the U.S., TVs, Bose headphones, Rubbermaid storage sets, pressure cookers, Roomba vacuum cleaning robots, the unrated Blu-ray version of “50 Shades of Grey” and Megular microfiber towels were top sellers. The sale spurred other retailers to try “Christmas in July”-type sales as well, most notably Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Shares of Amazon.com Inc. rose $14.29, or 3.1 percent, to close at $475.48 on Thursday. They have risen more than 33 percent over the past year.

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