[justinkramp]

Author (and I suspect many others) are missing the point of "Prime Day."

The point was not to sell a lot of stuff. The point was to get a lot of people to sign up for Prime. And I'll bet they won. My grandmother who hasn't bought anything on Amazon asked me about it and sure enough, we signed her up for a Prime trial too.

In this case, Twitter sentiment be darned. Amazon had no intention of making Prime Day about the deals. It had everything to do with getting more customers into Prime. And I guarantee you it did. Wal-Mart tried to play but chose the wrong game.

Amazon advertised a sale with a pretty simple rule: you must sign up for Prime. But they didn't put any restrictions on signing up. It wasn't exclusive to people who had already signed up before the announcement. They didn't charge new Prime customers $99 to get into the sale first. They created a lot of interest in a sale by talking about Black Friday, suckered Wal-Mart into jumping on board which only helped drive interest, and then rolled out some marginal deals on random products. Who cares if anyone bought a $14.99 Tupperware set for 40% off? We just got a bunch of people to sign up for a $99/yr membership. Lets say 1% of them convert after the paid period -- now you've just increased not only your $99/yr recurring revenue stream you've opened up opportunities for selling Video/Music and other products to your base. Pretty smart.