Key Takeaways From Amazon's Record Prime Day 2024
Back-to-School shopping and Apple were big winners among the better-than-forecasted tally, while another number gives us pause.
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* Adobe’s tally for Prime Day 2024 finds U.S. consumers spent $14.2 billion.
* Back-to-school shopping, Apple and BNPL were called out in Adobe's findings.
* The two-day event supports our view on AMZN shares, but could distort retail sales numbers.
In one of our earlier Alerts from today, we shared Amazon’s AMZN announcement that its 2024 Prime Day set another record. We can now put our arms around that because Adobe Analytics has released its two-day tally for this year’s shopping event. Per Adobe, U.S. consumers spent $14.2 billion during Prime Day 2024, up almost 12% compared to the 2023 tally of $12.7 billion. Adobe expected the event to clock in around $14 billion.
As we suspected, one area of spending strength was Back to School, which soared 216% compared to last year. Meanwhile, Electronics was up 61%, with Adobe calling out Apple AAPL, as a beneficiary with overall phone sales rising 18% year over year. Apparel and Furniture were also named as well-performing categories.
Adobe’s findings also put Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) at 7.6% of total sales across the event. While not exactly a massive figure, at more than $1 billion in size, it says something about the consumer.
While this is all a positive development and supports our rationale for holding AMZN shares in the The Street Pro portfolio, Prime Day accounts for only about 1% of Amazon’s sales in the current quarter. As such, we should not read too much into the findings, and also be mindful that the event will goose the July Retail Sales report. It should also pull forward Back-to-School spending that we tend to see in August, resulting in a sequentially softer headline retail figure in the August Retail Sales report.
At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long AMZN and AAPL.
