Breaking Down the Numbers: How Many Items Did Amazon Sell on Prime Day 2018?

Amazon revealed this week some numbers about Prime Day 2018 – and they are really big! Prime Day has become the biggest shopping day of the year for Amazon (beating both Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined) and Amazon really hit it big with sales this year

How Many Items Did Amazon Sell on Prime Day 2018?

Link: Amazon Prime Day Report

But, it was not without some hiccups! If you tried to shop early on in Prime Day on Monday afternoon, chances are you were met with the Amazon dog (up to 4 varieties of them) as it kept coming up that pages were missing. Obviously, they got hit pretty hard with some traffic! I’m just glad that it is a different team that is working on Bezo’s space dream (at least I think it is a different team!). 🙂

Speaking of that outage, it was estimated that Amazon lost about $99 million in sales during the time their site was on the fritz.

So, let’s look at some of the numbers first about Prime Day 2018.

InstaPots Were Hot

The InstaPot saw itself sold over 300,000 times as Amazon discounted it from the regular price of $100 down to $59. This item was obviously anticipated to sell big by Amazon because the few times I checked it out, it had not shown any out-of-stock or pushed out delivery dates. For those who bought them because you like good deals, hopefully you actually use them now (or they could make great gifts!).

Big Sellers – Amazon Devices and Fire Devices

A big no-surprise bit was that Amazon devices sold – and sold big! This is not a surprise because there were some insane deals on things like Kindle e-readers!

But, it wasn’t just Kindles as Alexa was a big seller as well. This means that Amazon is getting the voice of Alexa and Fire TVs into more homes around the world. This will definitely be something that Amazon will harness more over time as they already use Alexa to make exclusive deals available.

The Toshiba 4K Ultra HD Fire TV Edition (50-inch) and the Toshiba 4K Ultra HD Fire TV Edition (43-inch) are now the best-selling TV deals in Amazon history — together selling over six times as many TVs compared to last year’s record-setting Fire TV Edition – Amazon

Toys Were Moving – and So Was Tech

With the demise of Toys ‘R Us, more shoppers hit up Amazon for deals on toys (not that Toys ‘R Us was exactly known for cheap prices on toys). It was reported that over 5 million toys were purchased on Prime Day 2018!

Toys were not the only things that sold big. These categories also saw over 5 million items sold in each of them:

• Beauty products
• PCs and computer accessories
• Apparel and Kitchen products

Over 100 Million Items Sold

That’s right, over 100 million items were purchased by shoppers on Prime Day 2018! That is a large number for sure! This number is from worldwide shoppers as Amazon hits countries (17 countries this year) around the world now for Prime Day.

Last year, Amazon sold over $1 billion on Prime Day and they have said they sold more this time around than any other day ever so they certainly sold way over $1 billion!

Millions of pencils and school supplies were sold but I think it is fair to say that an average price of at least $15 for those items wouldn’t be out of reach.

Ring, Ring, Ring

If you are familiar with Shark Tank, you know that the biggest fish to get away without a deal has to be the item now known as Ring (DoorBot when it appeared on Shark Tank). This smart doorbell ended up attracting the attention of Richard Branson and eventually Amazon. Amazon reportedly paid $1.1 billion for Ring – when the sharks had turned down an offer or $700,000 for a 10% stake.

Anyway, Ring was a huge seller this year as well – Ring had its biggest day ever on Amazon on July 16, with the Ring Video Doorbell Pro selling out – Amazon.

Whole Foods Felt Prime, Too

This was the first Prime Day since Amazon took over Whole Foods and they rolled out some nice deals with them as well for Prime members. Amazon said shoppers saved millions of dollars at Whole Foods during the Prime Day sale and that the biggest seller was organic strawberries.

So, How Much Did Amazon Profit for Prime Day 2018?

Here is an amazing number I saw earlier this year – Apple had a net income of $13.8 billion in the first quarter of 2018 while Amazon had a net income of $9.6 billion in 21 years of existence.

That’s right, Amazon does not have a huge profit though they are definitely bringing in more of a profit now than they had before. The first quarter of this year saw them bring in a $1.6 billion profit.

So, while Amazon has not released figures on how much they profited for Prime Day 2018, we can deduce a couple of things – their profit was likely not much on the items they sold. Think of all the press and noise about the Prime Day event – this wasn’t paid advertising but rather millions of affiliates getting readers ready as they prepped their links for the sale (this site is also an Amazon affiliate – and thank you to all who shopped through our links!). With items giving a few percent per sale, Amazon paid out millions of dollars to affiliates for Prime Day.

Couple that with huge sales that likely wiped out any huge profits (and maybe even sold at under cost) and Amazon was not primed to bring in a huge profit from the items they sold on Prime Day.

Make no mistake – Amazon’s profit for Prime Day comes largely from the Prime memberships they sell. This year, we saw a hike of the Prime membership fee up to $119 per year and Amazon did say that they had more Prime memberships sold on July 16 than any other day in history.

Sure, a lot of people used trials but I am guessing that not that many will be cancelling it. Amazon has a nice profit margin on their Prime membership and that is something they sold a ton of this year.

We won’t know for a while how much Amazon actually did profit on Prime Day 2018 but we do know that they made a lot of money in Prime memberships! Between Prime memberships and Alexa, I think we are going to see a new avenue of sales for next year’s Prime Day that will cut affiliates out of some of the best deals. This will certainly gain Amazon a few more percent in not having to pay out on everything!

Title Edit: I always struggle to give post titles that encourage the reader to find out more yet also not something that is clickbait. While I thought that the previous question as the post title was accurate (since I genuinely did not know and thought it would be helpful to provide some numbers to contribute to guesses), apparently a couple of readers felt it was a clickbait title. While I never intended it to be such, I did not want to cause people to click on something they didn’t want to read so I have changed the title.

One more thing – Target also saw their biggest shopping day of 2018 so that tells you how big Prime Day was for more than just Amazon!