E560: Was This The Worst Prime Day Ever?

Dave joins the podcast today to talk about Prime Day 2024; what their early sales look like, whether Chinese Marketplaces are going to start more shopping holidays, and why this might be the worst Prime Day so far.

Today's episode is sponsored by Clearco, a company that provides ecommerce businesses with working capital to fund inventory, marketing, shipping and logistics, and more! Check them out today! 

Prime Day 2024 has been nowhere close to what we've seen in sales the year before. 

Now these might be niche and brand specific, but it's worth pointing out that maybe this year hasn't been as great as last year, where we saw 2.5x to 3x the number of sales. 

From a mixture of the early results and an overall negative perception of the shopping holiday, here's why Dave and I think this might be one of the worst Prime Days since its inception. 

Big Takeaways

• Prime Day sales boosts might not be felt by everyone – it could vary depending on brand and niche.
• If you aren't trying to spread brand awareness, it might not be worth it to sell your products at a loss.
• Chinese competitors like Temu and Shein might start to challenge Amazon's dominance on Prime Day and create their own shopping holidays in the US.

Timestamps

• 00:00 – Introduction and Sponsor
• 02:17 – Early Results of Prime Day
• 02:39 – Feelings about Prime Day
• 04:17 – Why this might be the worst Prime Day
• 06:32 – Pent-up demand and scouting orders the day before
• 09:57 – The Negative Perception Around Prime Day
• 12:41 – Will chinese competitors hop on the same trend?
• 14:17 – Predictions: More shopping holidays are coming
• 18:10 – Casual stories with Mike and Dave

As always, if you have any questions or anything that you need help with, reach out to us at support@ecomcrew.com if you're interested. 

Don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you enjoy our content. If you have any questions, send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com. We'd love to help you in any way we can. 

Thanks for listening!

Until next time, happy selling!

Transcript

Ecomcrew Intro (00:00.078):
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Sponsor (00:31.886):
Hey guys, I wanted to pause the podcast for just one moment and introduce you to today's sponsor, Clearco. Clearco is something that I wish was around in 2019 as our business was growing at the rapid rate that it was, and it seemed like we could just never get our hands on enough funding. Clearco provides e -commerce businesses with working capital to fund invoices and receipts, to fund inventory, for marketing, shipping, logistics, and

As an example, one of their customers, Cecil and Lou recently drove 25 % growth in new revenue by using ClearCo funding for their in -stock inventory, which accounts for 60 % of their 2024 revenue. ClearCo works with e -commerce stores from Amazon to Shopify to BigCommerce. It's simple. There's no collateral. It's non -dilutive. There's capped weekly payments, and there's no personal guarantee to get the working capital that you need to fund your

So go to clear .co, that's C -L -E -A -R dot C -O to sign up today and see what funding your business qualifies for. All right, now back to the show.

This is Mike. This is Dave. And welcome to this edition of the Ecomcrew podcast. Dave, it's like two times in a month we're recording together. It's good to see you again. Two times in a row and happy Prime Day. Happy Prime Day, we're recording this on Prime

every Amazon seller's dream of the year. Is it our dream? Q4. Not my dream. mean, I, we've talked about this thing years past. Well, it'll be interesting because I think that's what we're talking about today is just kind of Prime Day and how things are looking so far. And my feelings about Prime Day, your feelings about Prime Day, but it'll be, think an interesting episode. Yeah. mean, early results. So we're kind of midday through Prime Day. What's kind of your barometer for how Prime Day is looking.

this year compared to last. Pretty similar. I we see a, usually a 25 to 50 % lift in sales. Now keep in mind, we don't do anything for Prime Day. We don't run any Prime deals. We don't change our PPC spend, et cetera. I think Prime Day is a pretty brand specific niche specific thing, like of how you should approach it. Maybe we should have done this episode earlier to kind of tell people what to expect or what to do with Prime Day. But in general, my feeling is

Ecomcrew (02:55.314)
It's just a way to give up a whole bunch of margin for no reason and or lose money for no reason. If you have the type of brand like we have right now, with ice traps, is not, and we're not looking to do a brand building exercise. We're not looking to get our products in people's hands that maybe would not otherwise buy them, hoping for repeat business, hoping to extend our footprint, just get more units out in people's hands. I would look at something like color back when we ran it. Prime Day was a big part of what we did. I would be pushing that very hard.

If I ran a supplement brand or a food snacks or makeup or something that had a lot of repeat business, I would be leveraging Prime Day in every way I possibly could because again, you want to try to get those types of products in people's hands, even at a loss in hopes to get more repeat business and just slowly but surely, mean, those types of businesses are fun because when they hit this critical mass, your repeat business just exceeds your monthly advertising costs that you're currently at and the snowball continues to roll.

but for something like ice traps, feel like it's just giving up a bunch of margin. And what we'll see on prime day is again, we'll have a 50 % ish lift in sales at full price with no coupons, no extra whatever. It's just a good day for us. Things people may be having their cart or whatever. And our competitors, I see their prime deals, let them lose the money. Good for them. They can have that sale. I have no interest in selling stuff at a loss. So my feeling.

is that this prime day is actually, again, we're midway through the first day, but my feeling is that this is the worst prime day so far. And again, this is brand specific, but I'm looking at last year stats. were, man, almost three X on prime day one and about two and a half X on prime day two. I don't think we're going to get anywhere close to three X today compared to yesterday. So again, this is brand, it's brand specific, but that's my feeling is I'm going to be shocked

people across the board have the same results this year as they did last year. And who knows, right? This could just be brand specific and maybe we're just having the worst Prime Day and everybody else is killing it. But that is the trend line for this one brand right here, the camping brand. I'm just curious, checking out a couple other brands too and how they fared last year. But yeah, for that one brand, the camping brand, yeah, it was up 3X. I don't think we're gonna get close to 3X, maybe 2X this

Ecomcrew (05:14.978)
So I don't know, maybe I'm just trying to forecast my own internal beliefs that, you know, the economy's kind of sinking a little bit right now and people aren't spending as freely, but who knows, maybe everybody else is just killing it today on Prime Day. Yeah, and obviously we wish everyone the best and hope that it's going well. For us, for Ice Wraps, I mean, we're recording this before noon on Prime Day. This will go out shortly thereafter, but our sales are almost what they were yesterday before noon. Got it. we're going to have a good day. Like I said in years past, it's been pretty similar pace for us.

But we sell way cheaper products, right? mean, these are kind of necessity products. Like someone's got pain or whatever. They're going to need that ice pack pretty much right now. So maybe they put it in their cart and wait a day or two just to put it together with prime day. But we're having a good day. I mean, it looks like it's going to be an above average day. Yeah. It's interesting. I'm checking out another one of our brands. It's another outdoor brand last year on prime data. There was almost no noticeable uptick from prime days.

Clearly it's really brand dependent. So yeah, last year, this one brand, it had no uptick, very minimal, maybe 50 % uptick on day one and then almost nothing on day two. So yeah, probably a lot of brand dependency here, but that's kind of my feeling is probably this year won't be as good as last year, but who knows? guess we'll see what people's results are in a couple of days here. here's another question here for you, Mike. The lead up to prime day. So my kind of suspicion has been that there's just a lot of pent up demand and basically it's delayed.

buying that occurs on Prime Day rather than like this all of a sudden two or three X and new orders. What I think people are doing is holding off their spend and just saving up for Prime Day, helping to get in on some Prime Day deals. How has your experience been this year for that? Like, have you seen a kind of a slow trickle of orders in the days leading up to Prime Day? No, but again, I think this is all kind of brand specific. And so one of the things about ice packs and ice wraps, whatever it is, just as a brand, most people are buying that stuff.

at the moment they're having a problem. They like went out and did a crazy hike this weekend. They're a little sore cause they're out of shape. Maybe play pickleball this weekend or whatever, sprained their ankle and they need those ice packs. They're having surgery. They just had a kid, you know, so whatever it might be, it's usually I need this and I need it now rather than a discretionary thing. So I think, you know, if we, again, we're running a brand like color it or dog toys or supplements or whatever, we would see very different results. I do think

Ecomcrew (07:37.666)
people are looking through Prime Day deals and buying a bunch of stuff that they wouldn't have otherwise bought. Someone like my wife who loves deals would snap at the chance of stuff on Prime Day. She's now under this Nellis Auctions thing, is mostly overstock Amazon stuff that ends up in Nellis Auction. It's actually pretty funny. did a disposal. And we saw our stuff on there. It's pretty funny. And so she's like, she goes on there and just

finds a bunch of crap that she woke up and had no need for, but it's a deal, so she has to have it. And it drives me absolutely crazy, because I'm a minimalist and don't want anything else in this house. We're trying to get rid of stuff, and she's bringing stuff in that I know eventually is just going to end up in the garage in the corner collecting dust as we get in these back and forths on this. But yeah, people are probably looking at Prime Day going, it's just a consumeristic society. So they sit there and go,

want this or I want that or I could use this. And they kind of come up with some excuse of like, because it's a really good deal that I all of a sudden need a truck tent that maybe I wouldn't otherwise purchase or whatever, rather than something that they absolutely need. You know, that's certainly people that are in that discretionary income bucket, right? Where they are able to buy stuff that isn't absolute necessity. But I definitely think that a lot of that happens. So, you know, I think that people are doing well on Prime Day that have the right type of brand.

The first one that comes to mind, my friend Tal, who runs a PopSmith, the popcorn brand, they're doing like a Prime Day thing this year. And when I saw like them advertising that I'm like, yeah, perfect. Cause like it's the type of product that you get it in their hands. You would never buy this expensive popcorn maker otherwise in a lot of situations. You get it, you fall in love with it. It's like this beautiful piece of kitchenware that like we keep on display just because it's beautiful, but it also makes tasty popcorn. And so like you're going

Now reorder, it's like give away the razor and sell the blades kind of thing. So people go through the first six bags or whatever is in the box and they want more. They're going to go buy that at full price later. And it just keeps on accumulating that more and more and more over time. Like to me, that's like the perfect brand where someone's like, they wouldn't have otherwise seen that product, bought that product. They see it as a Prime Day deal and they're like, okay, that's pretty cool. Like I can get that thing at a sale and they go buy it. And I think those are the types of things that I can do very well with Prime Day.

Ecomcrew (09:57.996)
So anecdotally, what are you hearing in the media when it comes to Prime Day? And why I bring this up is I've definitely noticed, whether it's on the radio or TV or just browsing online, a lot more chatter organically about Prime Day. you know, like on the radio, the DJ just talking about, it's Prime Day today. And so I hear a lot more chatter about Prime Day. So Amazon's obviously done a really good job there in promoting Prime Day and like now all of sudden getting into people's vernacular and they're actually talking about Prime Day. But I also…

seem to hear also a little bit more cynicism where Prime Day is now this running joke where everyone slashes out their previous prices, which they're never sold at. And yesterday's price, 99 .99, today's price, 99 .99, but with the MSRP just jacked up and it looks like an artificial discount. So it definitely does feel like there's a little bit more cynicism around Prime Day where the deals aren't that great. So that's what I'm kind of seeing here in Canada and Vancouver. Are you getting that same feel in America?

Yeah, I mean, I think Amazon does a pretty good job of preventing what you're saying from happening because you can't just say, I have a $99 product or change the price to $129 .99 and then I'll just mark it back down to 99 and have the worst Prime Day deal. They were looking at your last, is it 30 or 90 days or whatever and won't let you get away with that. And so I don't know that that's really a thing. What I do think is a thing is that Prime Day was this new novel thing.

and was a one day short -lived thing that people were putting up really, really great deals for. And now it's extended to like two or three days, whatever it is now. I think it's three, right? Honestly, I haven't even paid as close attention as I maybe should since I'm in the industry. That's how jaded I've become to prime day, just because again, all the things I mentioned earlier. And I do think that Amazon has done a great job of getting it in the vernacular, right? It's just like one of these things where with repetition and just promotion, it goes

being like something new, novel, whatever, to just being something that you do every year, almost like Black Friday or something. It's a made up holiday that, or shopping day that they invented out of thin air to help sell stuff in the middle of the year when typically things are slower. And it's worked very well. And Prime Day for Amazon is just a huge moneymaker because they're fulfilling a lot more orders than normal. So they make all the money off of

Ecomcrew (12:17.292)
They charge astronomical amounts of money to put the deal up there to begin with. So they make the money from that. And the seller is the one giving up all the margin. So it's just like a win, win, win for Amazon and their customers love it, which is also a win for Amazon. So I think they've done a great job. You're kind of making their own, their own holiday of sorts. other thing I wonder as well. So I think there's a little bit more cynicism just from the mainstream media about prime day. I also wonder if this is going to be the year

Timu and Shan to a lesser degree start to eat away at Amazon's dominance on Prime Day a little bit. I do wonder if now all of a sudden a lot of that demand from people who realize, you know what, Timu is actually a way better deal for a lot of stuff than Amazon. If this may be the year where Timu kind of takes a little bit of a bite out of Amazon's Prime Day dinner. Yeah, I'm an advocate for anybody taking any bite out of Amazon of any kind, just to help them.

hit the reset button a little bit in terms of the way that they treat sellers. If they all of a sudden are losing some business to Tmoo and cheap Chinese goods over there, maybe they put a little bit more effort into focusing on brands and sellers on Amazon and treating them a little bit better because certainly they've been taking more more advantage of sellers over the last few years. so anything that gives Amazon a little bit of a challenge and puts a fire under their end, I think is good. So I'm all for it. Unfortunately,

when you talk about Timo, this is like the cheapest of the Chinese type of products, right? That are kind of coming through that pipeline. there's a whole bunch of that on Amazon already, obviously. And those things are competing against our higher quality products that we release. And visually, they look the same. So you're constantly having this challenge of trying to sell against a Timo type product on Amazon. When you have a higher price, it's a higher quality product, but how do you convey that message on Amazon and or get somebody to care?

That's another whole challenge and another podcast episode altogether someday. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree. Yeah. So I guess this is kind of a short one for prime day. Here's my other prediction to wrap things up. Speaking of Chinese competitors, I am going to guess in the next year or two, we're going to see singles day start to crouch into North America. So singles day is the big made up Alibaba holiday in China, which I believe

Ecomcrew (14:36.406)
out scales prime day by some magnitude. Yeah, for sure. I know is prime day equivalent to singles day or is it you think there's gonna be like another another day? like another new Chinese shopping holiday. Right. Or like, mean, so you're thinking just to get the prediction right, because I'm to come back and tell you that you were wrong. And if you're right, I will mention it. Okay. That's how this works. Yeah. Okay. We're figuring out what the stakes are here. Okay. Yeah. The baseline is. So you think there's going to be a second

US shopping holiday called Singles Day or something similar, or do you think that Prime Day is like kind of like the equivalent right now and that's how it's going to stay? I think Team U and Shein and some of these other Chinese marketplaces are going to start to push Singles Day more heavily on American consumers. US sellers. And whether it's actually sing they call it Singles Day or they figure out some other terminology for it, because I think Singles Day is kind of Alibaba's thing.

I suspect that we're going to start to see some made up holidays from TiMu and other Chinese competitors. They see what's going on with Prime Day. listen to the podcast. They want to get in on this action and they will create their own little made up holidays to compete with Prime Day. actually think that it would be brilliant if they did this because the timing is kind of impeccable. It's, I forgot the exact date, it's, it's like early to November. It's one, one, one, one, one or whatever. it's November 11th. Okay. So it's November 11th. I thought it was November.

Well, it's right before Black Friday. Black Friday already, like when I was a kid, Black Friday was Black Friday. Like, mean, it was a day after Thanksgiving. There was no other, like you didn't hear Christmas music before then. You didn't see any commercials about Christmas before then. was just like Black Friday, like Christmas season started on that day. And as I've gotten older and time has gone by, I swear that like I heard a Christmas commercial in Black Friday or pre Black Friday.

Black Friday is like going on every day is Black Friday, like in October, you know, just like it's creeping earlier and earlier. It's like pre -Halloween now. And so what a better way to take advantage of that part of our culture, throwing singles day into the U S market and having, like get ahead of Black Friday. We have better deals than anything. And then with the, and then with the 50 day shipping time, like it might actually arrive. It might actually coincide perfectly. Exactly. I'm going to agree with this prediction. I don't want to go against this one. I think that

Ecomcrew (17:01.038)
The world is getting smaller by the day in terms of globalization and just in the ability to ship things in less than 50 days. There's this crazy injection stuff now where like, I mean, it's been around for a while now, but like you ship things in batches and then it gets injected into the U S postal system. And to the U S customer, it looks like it shipped from across the street. You would never know the difference. And it happens in like three to five or seven business days or whatever it is. And

I can actually see this happening pretty quickly with the advent of things like TikTok or maybe it's Tmoo or some other things where now US consumers have the apps on their phone here localized in this market. And if it's seamless in terms of the shipping experience, I could absolutely see really quickly in the next like two to five years, Singles Day becoming a, and not even changing the name, it just becomes.

That's what it is. It's like people start to hear about Singles Day being a thing overseas and slowly it's a thing over here and people go Christmas shopping on November 11th. I think that that's entirely possible. Yeah, let's see. Well, happy Gwangunjie. Gwangunjie? There you go. Singles Something like that.

Singles day originally a day of activities for single people, but now also the world's biggest annual retail sales day, Guangdongjie. So there we go. Guangdongjie. Hey man, pretty good. I find Chinese to be like the most difficult language to even remotely try to speak. It's nuts. Like my wife was like, always like with the inflection. I'm like, she's like, no, I'm like, I'm saying it in my head that way. And it's just, I give up. It's it's so brutal.

That is real. You're saying like, you gotta go take a piss, like not a happy new year. I'm like, I just said the same thing, you know? It's like one little inflection. It's a completely different word. I mean, that is shocking for somebody with such fluent Spanish skills. mean, the fact that you been able to. Okay, I have to wrap up the podcast. Sorry, one more story. Okay, one more story.

Ecomcrew (19:17.482)
Okay, so I'm calling this Chinese restaurant. I always get my wife to call because she's Chinese and she speaks Chinese and like the English translation is never the same. But anyways, she was busy so I had to order. So she wanted to order three cup chicken. And so I say, I say, okay, can we get the three cup chicken? It's something totally different in Mandarin. They say, sorry, no fried chicken here. I say, okay, fine, okay, skip that one. My wife also wanted to get pea tips. Like pea tips are really common in Chinese still. Yeah, they're so big.

Exactly. They're delicious. So I said, okay, forget about the three cup chicken. Okay. Can we just get the P tips? Pizza? No pizza. they hang right up on me. What is three cup chicken? I never heard of three cup chicken. It's three spices, I think mixed with chicken. don't know. don't, I don't make it. But anyways, to wrap up the story too, my total about face, I had my seven year old daughter at the time call back and actually order for me who can

Her Chinese is slightly better than mine. So we ultimately did get our three cup chicken and our P tips. It's no P tips. All right. Good job, Dave. Thank you. Shisha. I'll be honest with you. Dave actually has been working on his Chinese. And I will say last time we were over there was speaking what seemed like fluent Chinese to me, to people in China. So you've done a great job over the years. I got to give you credit. Thanks. Well, the guy who can't even say, he can barely say thank you is judging my Chinese to be fluent. So I'll take it.

You were having a conversation in another language and pointing at me. So I know that you were able to communicate to other people in the room, how to make fun of me. And that's all that matters. I just got to work on the English and then I'll be good to go. There we go. All right, everybody. Hope you've enjoyed this episode. Happy Prime Day and best luck with everything. And until the next one, happy selling. We'll talk to you soon. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the e -comm crew podcast. If you haven't done so already.

please head over to iTunes and leave us a review. It helps more than you know. Did you know that eCom Crew has a ton of free content, including eCommerce courses? Head over to eComCrew .com slash free to check it out today. That's going to do it for this episode of the eCom Crew Podcast. Until the next one, happy selling and we'll talk to you soon.