It’s higher stakes than usual for some of Amazon’s biggest rivals—including Walmart—as the e-commerce giant’s 48-hour
The two-day online shopping extravaganza this year will be a competitive test for Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot and Nordstrom. All of these brands will have a chance to see if they've closed the e-commerce sales gaps that led to Amazon's stellar growth.
"Competitors will look to siphon off demand and ambush Amazon's traffic," said Greg Portell, lead partner in A.T. Kearney's global consumer and retail practice.
The main opportunity will come when many Amazon Prime customers compare prices before buying promoted items, giving competitors with streamlined shipping and payments processes — and the offer of same-day in-store pickup — an opportunity to win with compelling deals of their own.
Nearly 70% of U.S. consumers plan to price-check competitors on Prime Day deals during the July 15 and July 16 sales, and 50% will compare prices with Walmart, according to a recent survey from Austin-based digital marketing and analytics firm Adlucent.
Thirty-three percent of customers scouting Amazon Prime deals will compare prices at Target, 32% will comparison-shop items with Best Buy and 31% will go to other websites to check those prices against Amazon’s, the survey reports. Adlucent gathered its data three months ago via an online survey of 1,000 U.S. adults.
Walmart said it will offer thousands of discounts between July 14 and July 17 on merchandise on its website, including discounts on computers and home appliances.
Target will run its own “Target Deal Days” concurrent to Amazon Prime Days event on July 15 and July 16, promoting same-day pickup and delivery options.
Home Depot and Best Buy are expected to surprise consumers with spot sales and one-day deals with their respective same-day pickup services.
Another way rivals may capitalize on Prime Day is by picking up the slack if Amazon suffers another site crash, as occurred during last year's event.
"If the site crashes, look for competitors and the public to react swiftly," Portell said.
The losers on Prime Day will be any online merchant with friction in its shopping or checkout processes, said Richard Crone, a principal with Crone Consulting LLC.
"Prime Day has created a net-new Black Friday of middle-of-summer opportunity for anybody with a seamless process, particularly those with embedded payments," Crone said.
For Amazon rivals that have built payment credential registration into the online and mobile shopping process, Amazon Prime Day is a golden opportunity for sales, Crone said.
“Amazon Prime Day magnifies the importance for merchants having customers that already have a payment method registered within their app, like Walmart has with 58 million consumers, and some other brick-and-mortar retailers are working toward, so they can compete with the speed and seamlessness of Amazon,” Crone said.
Merchants with clunky online shopping apps and no bridge from the in-store shopping experience to online ordering will be more likely to lose out when customers price-check their merchandise, according to Crone.
Ironically, one store that doesn’t have a turnkey omnichannel system in place for Prime Day is Amazon’s Whole Foods subsidiary, Crone noted.
“Whole Foods and Amazon Go are both brick-and-mortar concepts Amazon operates that don’t give shoppers that same turnkey experience to go to the store’s app and buy an item online it’s out of stock on the shelf. That's the direction all of Amazon’s rivals should want to go,” he said.
Amazon's global sales from the extended two-day Prime Day period of about $5.8 billion are forecast to rise about 50% from last year’s $3.9 billion total, according to Coresight Research.
The U.S. alone will account for $3.6 billion, or 62% of all Prime Day sales, Coresight expects.
