Prime Day 2020 is over, with the official Amazon sale coming to an end last night. While there were a few Prime Day deals of note this year, it was one of the most disappointing shopping holidays to date.
With its proximity to Black Friday this year, we expected Prime Day to have steep discounts that would persuade consumers to buy now rather than later. And while there were some low prices on select products, there was a serious lack of mind-blowing sales.
What were the best deals on Prime Day?
We were expecting to see huge discounts on Apple Watches, cheap laptops, and Nintendo Switch bundles, but that just didn’t happen. While there were some price drops on older models, the majority of those discounts weren’t anything special.
Naturally, Amazon’s own devices got some really good price drops, but we expect that from them every year.
The best discounts beyond Amazon devices are on Prime Day robot vacuums, Instant Pots, 4K TVs, and AirPods. Some of these deals still remain, but you can be sure they will be back in time for Black Friday sales
Why weren’t there better Prime Day deals this year?
This year has been a difficult one for most people. The work-from-home movement that was spurred by the pandemic has more people ordering products online than ever before. In fact, e-commerce sales grew an astonishing 44% in Q2 and that trend is continuing. So if everyone is buying things online right now, shouldn’t there be more deals than ever? Well, not exactly…
Retailers don’t need to offer big discounts in 2020
Online retail giants like Amazon, Target, and Best Buy have been doing great. With big-ticket items like laptops, monitors, and gaming console sales jumping through the roof, demand has heavily outweighed supply on these products.
Unfortunately for consumers, that also means that a lot of the older stock that usually goes for cheap during the holiday buying season has already been depleted. And on top of that, these items have become more of a necessity than ever before, so people are willing to pay full price for them.
Prime Day was too close to Black Friday
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, it’s highly possible that most retailers didn’t want to drop their best discounts yet, so we saw less competitive pricing across the board. Amazon tends to automatically match prices on its site based on what other retailers are offering, but there was a significant lack of ‘doorbuster’ deals on each site.
More of a cash grab than a real sale
While there were some pretty good deals over the last two days, the sales didn’t run very deep. This has been most apparent with Walmart’s Prime Day sale, which was pretty much just a quick banner change on their home page and a smattering of kitchen appliance discount.
All-in-all, it’s a pretty good strategy to capitalize on early holiday shoppers who usually see Prime Day as a good chance to get their shopping done early.
Will Black Friday deals be better than Prime Day?
We believe that Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be a better source of savings thanks to the Amazon deals. We already know that Walmart Black Friday will be spread across three different weekends, and has better discounts planned.
That being said, 2020 has been a year of things not going as planned. With the pandemic still raging and unemployment rates at an all-time high, many companies are still bracing for an economic recession.
If things go as we expect them to, however, we’re likely to see some more Black Friday laptop deals, headphone deals, and iPad deals than we saw for Prime Day. Once one retailer starts offering really good discounts, all of the others will follow suit.
