Coming soon: the hottest day of the season to “score” a winning deal with Amazon.
The company is about to celebrate its first “score,” or twenty-year milestone, with a prime-time sales bonanza.
What better time to invite more of its customers to join its $99 Prime loyalty subscription program? The company will do that by offering thousands of deals on July 15 in the nine countries that offer its Prime loyalty program: the U.S., U.K., Spain, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Canada and Austria.
Like Christmas in July, Amazon claims there will be more deals available on July 15 than on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, topping even Cyber Monday. Will Prime Wednesday generate more subscribers for Prime, free, two-day deliveries, multiple channels of movies, videos, a Kindle lending library and more?
Amazon won’t release the exact number of Prime members it currently has, but some estimates put the number at 35-40 million. How many of those customers will be paying attention to a major promotion in the lazy, hazy days of Summer remains to be seen.
While Amazon is recognized as the world’s largest online retailer, the company has yet to make any real money, part of an ingenious strategy adopted by CEO Jeff Bezos to capture global market share and transform the buying habits of consumers before becoming profitable. Back in 2014, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer quipped that Amazon is not a real business.
“One capability every business is expected to have is the capability to make money,” Ballmer said. “It requires a certain kind of discipline, a certain kind of mindset. … As a businessman, if you ask me what I’m proud of, I’m proud of the fact that I made $250 billion under my watch as CEO.”
Investor Nick Hanauer takes a different view: “If Jeff wanted that company to generate free cash flow, he could do it at the push of a button. He is trading off profits for growth; he has always been trading off profits for growth.”
Amazon’s latest product innovation, a voice-controlled, digital assistant dubbed Amazon Echo, has earned rave reviews for one-upping both Google Glass and the Apple Watch with an always-on, user-friendly spoken-word interface. The Echo’s voice persona that goes by the “wake up name” of Alexa will tell you jokes on demand, spell or define words, inform you of your favorite sports teams’ schedules and scores, advise the weather forecast in any city on the planet or read a personal News Flash, for starters! The finely tuned speaker will also play your favorite music artists or online radio programs on demand. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Amazon might also be planning to launch an app similar to Uber that will pay people for delivering its packages.
Get primed for Prime Wednesday. July 15th will be another red-letter day for predicting just how hot Amazon’s’s Prime business model will become! [24×7]
