Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime Day is considered one of the biggest sales holiday but it is easily trumped by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) Single’s Day as far as sales are concerned.
Amazon’s Prime Day is expected to bring in $2 billion in sales this year but that figure is already dwarfed by Alibaba’s Single’s day sales for 2016 which were almost $18 billion. The Single’s day was launched in the 1990s by college students as an anti-Valentine’s day celebration which is years earlier than the Prime Day’s debut. The early launch is believed to be one of the reasons why Single’s day is does significantly better than Prime Day in terms of sales.
Alibaba’s event takes place for 24 hours and is held on November 11 every year and it is usually open to all customers while Prime Day is usually limited to premium subscribers. This another reasons why Single’s Day performs better in sales. Despite being the younger of the two, Prime Day is definitely growing at a fast rate. It is considered the biggest day for Amazon and is even bigger than Black Friday.
“Certainly revenue is important. But there’s a lot of data points out there that Prime members spend more than non-Prime, are retained longer,” stated Kerry Rice, an analyst at Needham & Company
Unlike Alibaba’s Single’s Day, Prime Day mainly focuses on building its Prime membership. Amazon announced that hundreds of thousands of new customers subscribed to the service in 2015. The American retail giant reported a significant gain in its stock on Monday as a result of Prime Day, thus proving how powerful the event is for the company. It is believed that the event has a significant impact on the company’s top line. Unfortunately, it is not clear just how much because Amazon does not disclose the figures.
Rice stated that Alibaba is obviously strides ahead as far as Single’s day is concerned. The company even brings celebrities on board to celebrate the day and Amazon has a long way to go before catching up.
Alibaba stock closed the latest trading session on Wednesday at $149.00.