Amazon Prime Day has become one of the biggest sales days of the year (and is fast becoming much more than just one day but a weeklong event). As such, it lends critical insight into the consumer mindset headed into the holiday season, and this year that intel is more necessary than ever.
However, Amazon has always been a bit finicky about sharing specific sales data from the event, and with other retailers jumping on the bandwagon and launching competitive sales, a neutral source of sales intel is crucial. Enter Adobe Digital Insights, which tracks 100 million SKUs online across 18 categories and has become the go-to source for intelligence when it comes to Prime Day sales performance.
This year’s Prime Day period presented multiple interesting insights into where consumers’ heads are, but the bottom line is that value is key — so much so that consumers took their time over the four days of the Prime event this year to ensure they were getting the best deal.
That price sensitivity will continue into holiday, according to Vivek Pandya, Director at Adobe Digital Insights: “The consumer still has a strong perception that they’re going to get the best absolute deal on Black Friday,” he said on this week’s episode of Retail Remix. “That becomes even more important [this year] because you see the consumer prioritizing price over speed, efficiency, convenience.
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“What is absolutely clear is that consumers will be very strategic and conscientious about where they can get the best absolute value,” he added. “When the holiday season comes around, we’ll see them leaning on generative AI platforms; we’ll see them taking advantage of promo discounts from affiliates and social influencers.”
That in fact, is another key insight that Adobe gleaned from the Prime Day data this year — both AI-powered shopping interfaces and human creators had a significantly increased influence on Prime Day spend, and that influence will continue. While they may seem like two opposing forces, as Pandya shares, social media content like that generated by creators and publishers is crucially important in the race to be visible within these new AI search tools, such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity.
“It’s really incumbent on brands and retailers to not to just make sure their own ecommerce storefronts are well optimized, but that they’re promoting their brand across different social networks, across the larger media ecosystem, so that when people are saying, ‘I want this type of product that has this type of feature,’ they’re being picked up [in AI searches] versus someone else,” he said.
Learn more about what to expect from consumers this holiday season, as well as how to ensure your brand has all the elements in place to ensure visibility in AI search in the full episode. Listen here or anywhere you get your podcasts.
