Amazon Prime Day this year attracted a flood of bargain-seeking shoppers, who bought more than 250,000,000 items around the world, from robotic vacuums to Crest Whitestrips.However, that might not have been enough for the event to propel it to deliver remarkable sales growth as in previous years. Bank of America analysts stated Thursday.The bank noted a few "signs" of soft growth compared to 2020. These included the fact that Prime Day occurred just eight months after last year's event compared with 15 months between Prime Day 2020 and Prime Day 2019. The bank moved the event back to its summertime time slot after last year's delayed, pandemic-delayed Prime Day in Oct just before Christmas.The Bank of America analysts stated that Amazon did not disclose any details regarding the results of its post-Prime Day report. Notably, the results did not include the usual sales superlatives that Amazon uses as well as key figures such as third-party seller sales."Amazon did reveal that 250 million items had been sold. This represents a 20% compound annual growth rate over 175 million items sold in Prime Day 2019. But likely limited growth in 2020," Justin Post and Michael McGovern, Bank of America analysts, wrote in a note to shareholders. We believe that this Prime Day experienced a lower level of growth than previous years due to the fact that it occurred in a shorter time frame, lack of new countries, and lack of disclosures.Although Amazon does not disclose the total Prime Day sales, Post and McGovern estimate that Prime Day 2021 gross merchandise volume was $9.55 Billion, a mere 7% increase over last year. They compare this to the 54% increase in 2020 Prime Day gross merchandise volumes year-over-year. Adobe Analytics released Wednesday's report estimating that the total U.S. ecommerce sales, which included Amazon competitors, was $11 billion over the two-day event.However, not everyone on Wall Street agrees that Prime Day is underwhelming.Piper Sandler analysts stated that Prime Day results were in line with their estimates. They forecasted Amazon bringing in $7.5 billion over the two-day event. Piper Sandler analysts Thomas Champion, and James Callahan said that this is a "solid result" given that India and Canada did not participate due Covid.Baird analysts pointed to Salesforce data Wednesday, which showed that Prime Day and other rival deals fell 1% in comparison to October last year. Although the data might be disappointing, analysts at Baird said that they were not too concerned.Analysts wrote that it was essentially in line to our forecast for "slightly lower" sales. "Our assumption was largely based on the few physical store openings last autumn as well as the proximity to October Prime Days and the holiday shopping season."
