Amazon Prime Early Access Day Volume Drops 25%, But This Analyst Keeps The Faith: Here's Why

E-commerce leader Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN held its Prime Early Access event Oct. 13-Oct. 14 to kick off the holiday sales season.

Here’s a look at early data and what one analyst is saying about the event.

The Amazon.com Analyst: Bank of America analyst Justin Post had a Buy rating and a price target of $157 on Amazon.

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The Analyst Takeaways: Amazon announced that tens of millions of Prime members “ordered more than 100 million items” from third-party vendors.

Some of the companies cited as being popular during the shopping event were Apple Inc AAPL, Peloton Interactive Inc PTON and Bose. Amazon also saw several of its devices such as Echo, Fire TV and Kindle sell well during the event.

“Data suggests lighter sales than Prime Day event in July,” Post said.

The analyst said July’s Prime Day event had a press release that said it was the biggest Prime Day ever, something not shared in the October press release.

“Third-party data service Numerator reported that Amazon’s Prime Early Access sales results were lower than typical Prime Day sales, which we think makes sense given the recent Prime Day in July.”

The data points to many of the categories seeing a decline in sales compared to the July sale. Mentions of Prime Early Access on Twitter were down 70% compared to the July event according to the data.

“We estimate $8 billion in gross merchandise value for the two-day event, down from $10.7 billion in GMV for the July event (a 25% decline).”

The GMV estimate would represent 4% of the estimated GMV for the fourth quarter from the analyst, compared to the July event making up 7% of its respective quarterly GMV.

“Ultimately, we view this Early Access event as incrementally beneficial, as both a branding event for Prime and potentially smoothing holiday demand aiding with logistics.”

Post said this event was not branded as a full Prime Day, which could explain the decline from the July full event.

AMZN Price Action: Amazon shares are down 2.65% to $109.48 on Friday versus a 52-week range of $101.26 to $188.11.

Photo: Courtesy Amazon