China’s ecommerce giant Alibaba has become so successful in its Single's Day marketing campaign that on Nov. 11, 2015, it broke again its record by selling $14.3 billion worth of merchandise to unmarried Chinese.
If the world goes gaga over Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Grandparent’s Day, marketing geniuses soon recognized the income potential in celebrating singlehood amid more people – whether millennials, Generation Xers or Baby Boomers – preferring not to get married by choice or default.
Amazon saw the income potential of imitating what Jack Ma’s company did and created its own version, the Prime Day, every July 12. If people buy gifts for their parents and grannies and grandpops on their respective days, a single person not in a relationship has no one to buy him or her a gift, so creators of Single’s Day in China marked the 11th day of the 11th month of every year as a time to splurge on themselves, because no one would.
But Amazon’s Prime Day has an admission price which is the $99 annual membership fee of the shopping club which comes with perks such as free delivery and access to a streaming video library, according to Computerworld.
Analysts estimate that in 2015, Amazon’s Prime Day earned for the American ecommerce giant between $350 million and $400 million. It was the result of 398 items being ordered every second, with TV sets as the most popular product.
MKM Partners analysts forecast that Amazon could double sales for this year’s Prime Day from its 2015 sales. But even if Amazon achieves that, it would still pale in comparison to Alibaba’s growth in Single’s Day sales by 5.6 times on its third year and 3.7 times on its fourth year.