Primeday is further postponed! It may overlap with the start of the school year

In early April, we reported that an internal letter from Amazon revealed that Prime Day would be postponed for at least a month. After April and May, under Trump's "astonishing" protests, the number of infections in the United States successfully exceeded 1.5 million, and the death toll was close to 100,000.

With the President making things worse, what the sellers were worried about finally happened. Primeday is likely to be postponed again to September!

The news of the postponement was revealed by the Wall Street Journal, which said that Amazon is currently busy dealing with the surge in orders and product demand during the epidemic, and does not have sufficient transportation capacity to support orders for the big holiday promotion in the near future. Therefore, it is planning to postpone Primeday again to September.

This is basically consistent with our previous expectations of Amazon's current shipping capacity. Although Amazon lifted the replenishment restrictions a while ago, the delivery time has not returned to the previous level. Only a small number of places can achieve 2-day delivery. It is far from the one-day delivery time last year.

Amazon has now recruited more than 100,000 new warehouse positions, but they are still barely enough to meet the needs. The situation of "goods are available but cannot be delivered" has become "basically able to be delivered, but very slowly." There is still a long way to go to restore the previous delivery level.

Even before the pandemic, Amazon's shipping capacity was somewhat stretched during major holiday sales. In December last year, Amazon had too many orders for Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday, and was still delivering orders for the day several weeks after the sale ended, causing Amazon to directly notify sellers to stop restocking to allow warehouses to slow down.

Now, the epidemic has led to a serious shortage of manpower, but orders have surged. Is it a big deal to hold a Prime Day under such circumstances? Postponing the promotion until the transportation capacity is restored is almost the only option for Amazon.

What impact will it have if Member Day is postponed to September?

In fact, postponement is not necessarily a bad thing, especially for certain categories that have low demand during the epidemic.

When the epidemic is rampant, people's consumption tendencies are very different from usual. They will increase their investment in some necessary daily necessities and epidemic prevention supplies, and will correspondingly reduce the purchase of some less necessary products (such as outdoor and clothing, etc.). If Prime Day is held at this time, it will be a serious blow to these non-essential categories.

The benefits of the postponement are also reflected in Amazon's stock price. Logically, the company's stock price would definitely fall if such a big promotion festival was postponed again and again, but after major foreign media reported the news, Amazon's stock price rose by about 0.5%. This also fully shows that postponing Prime Day is an inevitable move with more benefits than disadvantages.

Although September is usually the beginning of the peak season at the end of the year and the start of the school year, this year the United States has stopped school activities due to the epidemic, which means that the arrangements for returning to school will be completely different from previous years. Therefore, whether the impact of the overlap will be significant depends on the development of the epidemic and policy speculation in the United States in the future.

In previous years, if sellers wanted to participate in Primeday, they not only had to prepare goods and register in advance, but also had to get their product rankings and reviews to a better position as early as possible to get a good promotion schedule.

This year, due to the pandemic, all plans were disrupted. Amazon only recently resumed its restocking restrictions. If Prime Day were still held in July, it would be too late to stock up and rush to rank high.

If Prime Day is postponed to September, sellers will have more time to prepare for the big sale. If we stock up now to boost rankings and get more reviews, this year's Prime Day will definitely be a big hit. However, Amazon has been strict in its inspections recently, and has used warning letters to lock down stores.