Ashley Vannoy, head of marketing at Alexander Del Rossa
Alexander Del Rossa expected Prime Day-levels of sales during Amazon.com Inc.’s apparel-focused promotional event Big Style Sale. In fact, sales blew past expectations on just the first day of the sale on June 22, says head of marketing Ashley Vannoy at Alexander Del Rossa.
Marketplace giant Amazon, No. 3 in the ranking of Digital Commerce 360 Top 100 Online Marketplaces, launched a 7-day sale focused on apparel running June 22-28 that featured hundreds of brands and thousands of on-sale spring and summer apparel items.
Alexander Del Rossa, which has sold on the Amazon marketplace for the past 15 years, offered 30% off some of its products during the Big Style Sale. Products had to have 4 stars or above to be featured in the sale, Vannoy says. Alexander Del Rossa sold through a month’s worth of inventory on the first day of the sale, Vannoy says. In the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., sales doubled year over year, but with results from the June sale, revenue could be up 400% year over year, Vannoy says.
Not all merchants had this roaring success, however. Data from apparel clients that use marketplace technology vendor Feedvisor shows the Style Sale had a limited impact on its apparel merchants. Feedvisor manages 7.5 million products on Amazon, however, it declined to reveal the number of apparel merchants it works with.
For the week of the Big Style Sale June 22-28, sales for clothing, shoes and jewelry for Feedvisor clients increased 31% for that week compared with the week of Feb. 3-9, which was before President Donald Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency. However, apparel sales were elevated about the same throughout the month of June, up 27% June 1-7 compared with Feb. 3-9, up 32% June 8-14 and up 33% June 15-21. However, the week after the sale, June 29-July 5, apparel sales were only a 16% increase above the Feb. 3-9 baseline.
Prime Day is Amazon’s annual sales event in mid-July that it launched in 2015 to celebrate 20 years since Amazon.com’s launch. Digital Commerce 360 estimates Amazon sold $7.16 billion worth of goods during its 24-hour sales event in 2019. Amazon has not announced a date yet for Prime Day 2020, although media outlets have reported Amazon will likely push it to the fall because of COVID-19. Amazon did not comment if its Big Style Sale is a Prime-Day replacement.
Compared with the build-up of Prime Day, the Big Style Sale had little promotion or buzz. For example, typically Amazon will redesign its site during Prime Day and have its packaging tape and boxes promoting the date for the sale. By contrast, the Big Style Sale only had one rotating hero image promoting the sale.
Apparel merchants that use digital advertising platform Kenshoo only modestly increased their marketing spending week over week during the sale, says Chris Costello, senior director of marketing research at Kenshoo.
The event was underwhelming with little advertising or curation of products, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of marketplace data firm Marketplace Pulse. “While Prime Day has become a somewhat known event, this Style Sale was very forgettable,” he says.
Amazon sales events, however, still generated a lift in sales, despite lackluster presentation, Kaziukėnas adds.