亚马逊Prime Day提前一个月，AI重塑购物体验

Amazon kicks off its annual Prime Day sales event this week, one month earlier than usual. The world's fifth largest company trying to compete for fewer discretionary dollars from consumers as AI takes a larger role in the shopping process. With us now is Poonam Goyal, senior ecommerce and retail analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. Great to have you with us. Let me play the role of the cynic here who thinks this is a silly made up holiday that I guess many millions of people participate in.

But how critical is it to Amazon's bottom line, and and why the move in date here? Why move this up in the way in which Amazon has? Sure. So it is very important for Amazon. It's a time where they can offer deals, through their own products and their third party products and really drive consumer spend. It's about pulling spend forward. Right? If you think about the holiday calendar year, there really isn't such an event in the summer outside of back to school.

So when they launched this in the summer, it was just to pull forward much of the spend to try to grab the consumers' wallets and dollar share earlier. Do they do that? Yes. And how important is it to answer your question? It's very important. They don't disclose how much they capture on Prime Day, but we do know that it's a meaningful driver to their top line. When it comes to the bottom line, because it is deal driven, I would think that, you know, a lot of it doesn't flow to the bottom line as there are deep discounts placed in here just like they are on Black Friday.

So then what is the point of this? If they're not really making a bottom line profit off of this, is it just to get consumers in the door? It is to get consumers in the door, but more than that, it's to get Prime members. If you think about the Prime ecosystem, over 200,000,000 Prime members around the globe, what this day does, and based on our survey that we ran for the last five years, is it attracts more Prime sign ups.

So you can only shop on Prime Day, Prime deals, if you are a Prime member. And in our survey, we ask this every year. Do you know, if you don't own Prime, why, and do you plan to sign up for Prime? And what we found is the younger generations, the millennials, the Gen z's, are very likely, if they don't have it, to sign up for Prime Day and then keep the subscription indefinitely. So that's where the value add is. Thank you for including millennials and the younger generation.

We appreciate that here at the table. David, go ahead. Good. And you and your colleagues have done this survey of of consumers who are gonna gonna maybe avail themselves of of these discounts, and you look at kind of spending during Prime Day. That's one of the questions that you you asked, how much consumers intend to spend when when these Prime Day celebrations are are underway. And I'm curious what those numbers tell you.

Maybe we have a a screenshot that we can put on the screen sort of it seems like it's mostly in the middle there between a 100 and 1 and $200. So not an extremely large amount of money that people plan to spend. What does it tell you about the health of the consumer more broadly, their appetite to spend more, their capacity to spend more right now when we see kind of the economic constraints at play that we do? Yeah.

So consumers are definitely pulling back and which is what makes us stay important. As you mentioned, you know, when you look at the sweet spot or that midrange here between a 100, $200, it's about the same really as last year. But when you look at the higher, band here, the $500 or above, you can see that there's a slight pullback. So there is some pullback that we are expecting this year based on higher gas prices, just inflation from tariffs, etcetera, And we do think that consumers are going to be deal savvy.

In fact, you know, in our survey, we had asked how many of you have a list before going into Prime Day and what you wanna buy? And it was over 50% said that they have a list of what they intend to buy on Prime Day. And not only that, when we look at the categories that they're buying on Prime Day, it's not your big ticket items. I mean, it is, but it isn't all of it. There's a lot of everyday items that they're planning to buy, and that just kind of goes to show you that Prime Day is important because they're looking to buy what they wanted for maybe the last three months or into the next three months on Prime Day to really take advantage of those deep deals.

You also found in your research that agentic sales are increasing to $500,000,000,000 by 2030. And I turned to our producer this morning, Patrick, and I said, what does that mean? Does that mean, like, AI is procuring things for companies? And he said, no. That can include a lot of things. So can you explain to us what you mean in a retail setting by agentic sales and agentic agents and why this is gonna be such a big thing and already is becoming such a big thing so quickly?

Absolutely. So when you think about ecommerce sales today, most of them happen through your mobile app, you browsing, and buying them directly. Agentic has a few different ways you could look at it. One is fully agentic, and one is semi agentic. So the $500,000,000,000 number that you refer to is fully agentic. That means you go into an agent and you say, I'd like to buy a black dress for prom. Let's just say that that's your query.

That's all you have to say. One prompt, and it knows where you wanna buy it. It knows how much you wanna spend, and it knows how soon you not need it, and it just ships to your door. Now is that gonna happen for that black dress for prom? Probably not. But will it happen for your laundry detergent, for your gallon of milk, for your tools, for your tires? Sure. So replenishment items are a big part of the fully agentic equation.

But semi agentic, which is when you use an AI agent to talk back and forth to, like, Amazon, Alexa for shopping, it's when you engage the agent to search for something. For example, when you use Alexa for shopping, you go ahead and say, I want this power washer, for example, and find me the best power washer. It needs to wash this many square feet. It needs to have AI abilities, etcetera, and it needs to be under $500.

Today, it's $650. When it drops to 500, I should have it. Interesting. And it just happens. In three weeks when it drops, you'll have it at your door. So that's semi agentic, and we think over 60% of transactions in ecommerce in 2030 will have an agent involved in one way or another.