Walmart Gate-Crashes Amazon’s Annual Sales Bash

It’s not quite Christmas in July, but when the nation’s two largest retailers hold overlapping sales events, you’ve got something approximating a warm-weather Black Friday.

Starting today, Amazon and Walmart are kicking off summer deals promotions — with the former’s Prime Day event running until July 11, and the latter’s “Walmart Deals” running until July 13. History suggests that a little competition will be good not only for Walmart and Amazon, but also the retail sector as a whole.

Rising Prime Lifts All Boats

The two were bound to butt heads like this. Last summer, Walmart launched its online-only Walmart Deals event as a bit of a preemptive strike — with the promotion running a couple of weeks ahead of Amazon’s typical late-July Prime event (so as to pick off a few shoppers who had been waiting to scoop up a new vacuum). This year, Amazon bumped up its Prime event to the same week as Walmart Deals and announced in June that Prime Day would now span four days. (Launched in 2015, Prime Day has been a two-day event since 2019.)

Walmart, apparently, took Amazon’s expanded event announcement last month as something of a challenge, and days later announced that its summer deals event would last six whole days. Perhaps equally importantly, Walmart said it’d be running its promotions in its brick-and-mortar stores this year as well as on its online platform.

The result? A summer sales spectacular that’s likely to prove a blockbuster for more than just the two constantly one-upping rivals:

• According to an Adobe Analytics report published Monday, US e-commerce sales could reach as high as $23.8 billion, or the equivalent of “two Black Fridays,” during the Prime Day event this year — about $9.6 billion more than last year. In addition to Walmart, retailers including Target and Kohl’s are hosting parallel Prime Day promotions this year.
• Adobe’s estimates may even be undershooting the money-making potential. According to Bank of America analysts, the 96-hour Prime Day event could generate as much as $21 billion in gross merchandise value for Amazon alone, which would mark a full 60% increase from last year’s sales figures.

Sticker Shock: The salesapalooza likely can’t come soon enough for increasingly wary (and weary) US shoppers, who have been rattled this year by trade war woes and broader economic fears. “People are going to strike when they know the deals are hot, and that’s what Prime Days are all about,” retail analyst Bruce Winder recently told MarketWatch. The deals-off may be just as useful for the increasingly wary retailers, which are fretting about year-over-year downturns in their next quarterly reports as consumer sentiment starts to sink. “These deals are being offered to try to make some of [those potentially declining sales] up,” Forrester principal analyst Sucharita Kodali told Retail Brew.