- Amazon has announced the dates for its annual Prime Day sales next month.
- The ecommerce giant will host Prime Day sales on 16th and 17th July in 23 countries this year.
- It is also planning to host one later in the year for India.
In years gone by, when Amazon announced when Prime Day was happening each year, those in South Africa had little to get excited about. With Amazon officially opening up a local ecommerce site earlier this year, there is hope that South Africans can get involved in the two-day long online sales event.
For 2024, Amazon has just confirmed which dates next month it plans to host Prime Day – 16th and 17th July.
“From July 16 at 12:01 a.m. PDT through July 17, Prime members get exclusive access to millions of deals across more than 35 categories including electronics, kitchen, beauty, and apparel. New deals will continue to drop as often as every 5 minutes during select periods throughout the event, so members can come back and shop often to find something they love,” it noted in a blog post.
“Over the course of last year, Amazon customers saved nearly $24 billion from deals and coupons—with Prime members enjoying the vast majority of those savings—including over $2.5 billion during Prime Day 2023,” added Jamil Ghani, VP of Amazon Prime, illustrating just how big of an event it has become for the company.
Per TechCrunch, the ecommerce giant has also highlighted which other countries outside of the United States it plans to hold simultaneous Prime Day sales, bringing the total to 23 at time of writing.
These are, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the UK.
The publication also noted that a standalone event is planned for India later in the year.
Scrolling the countries listed above and you will notice that South Africa is absent. We have reached out to Amazon’s local representation regarding a Prime Day sales event locally or something similar.
Once we have feedback we will share it with our readers, but speculating the reason for SA not being a part of Prime Day plans right now, the aforementioned local site launch was noted as being a soft launch.
If we look at the website in comparisons to ones in other parts of the world, the product catalogue is still relatively small, not to mention no Amazon Basics products featuring either. As such, the local website may simply not be ready to handle the traffic of a Prime Day.
As we have seen during past Black Friday sales, local ecommerce platforms have struggled to keep their websites up. If the same thing happened to amazon.co.za it would no doubt damage its reputation, especially as Chinese platforms Shein and Temu are vying to dominate SA’s ecommerce market and supplant Takealot.
[Image – Andrew Stickelman on Unsplash]
