

#PrimeDayFail - usaphp
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nicoleleinbachreyhle/2015/07/15/prime-day-fail-or-prime-day-success-let-these-numbers-be-the-judge/

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justinkramp
Author (and I suspect many others) are missing the point of "Prime Day."

The point was not to sell a lot of stuff. The point was to get a lot of people
to sign up for Prime. And I'll bet they won. My grandmother who hasn't bought
anything on Amazon asked me about it and sure enough, we signed her up for a
Prime trial too.

In this case, Twitter sentiment be darned. Amazon had no intention of making
Prime Day about the deals. It had everything to do with getting more customers
into Prime. And I guarantee you it did. Wal-Mart tried to play but chose the
wrong game.

Amazon advertised a sale with a pretty simple rule: you must sign up for
Prime. But they didn't put any restrictions on signing up. It wasn't exclusive
to people who had already signed up before the announcement. They didn't
charge new Prime customers $99 to get into the sale first. They created a lot
of interest in a sale by talking about Black Friday, suckered Wal-Mart into
jumping on board which only helped drive interest, and then rolled out some
marginal deals on random products. Who cares if anyone bought a $14.99
Tupperware set for 40% off? We just got a bunch of people to sign up for a
$99/yr membership. Lets say 1% of them convert after the paid period -- now
you've just increased not only your $99/yr recurring revenue stream you've
opened up opportunities for selling Video/Music and other products to your
base. Pretty smart.

