Amazon is heading into its annual Prime Day sales event on Tuesday much differently than how it entered the pandemic.
The company has long used the two-day event – one of its biggest all year – to lure people to its Prime membership, for which Amazon recently raised the price to $139 a year from $119 a year.
Amazon doesn’t disclose total Prime Day sales, though research firm Insider Intelligence suggests sales could climb to about $7.76 billion in the U.S. alone – or 16.8% over last year — in part because of the event’s mid-July timing, which compared to last year’s June date would allow the company to capture more consumers doing back-to-school shopping.
Amazon could use the boost amid a slowdown in overall online sales. Once the darling of the pandemic economy, the company posted a rare quarterly loss in April as well as its slowest rate of revenue growth in nearly two decades – at 7%. Inflation had added roughly $2 billion in costs.
Amazon also acknowledged it had too many workers and expects its excess capacity from its massive warehouse expansion during the pandemic to total $10 billion in extra costs for the first half of this year.