Prime Day is almost here. Actually, it’s two days. But who’s counting? Well, Amazon sure is. Scheduled for June 21 and 22, the annual sales event is closely followed by many Prime members eager for deals.

Overcoming a lackluster 2015 debut and a 2018 online outage, Prime Day has become one of the most important annual events for the company, effectively creating a second peak season, six months after the traditional holiday shopping rush.

Providing a sense for the scale, Amazon says customers saved $1.4 billion during Prime Day last year.

Last year, Amazon delayed Prime Day to October due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was previously held in July. This year, the lingering impact of the pandemic is both complicating Prime Day and raising the stakes.

On this episode of Day 2, GeekWire’s podcast about everything Amazon, we go behind the scenes of Prime Day with two e-commerce veterans:

Our podcast collaborator, Jason Boyce, former Top 200 third-party seller, founder of Avenue7Media and co-author of The Amazon Jungle.
Andrea Leigh, vice president of strategy and insights at Ideoclick, a Seattle-based e-commerce technology and services firm that works with vendors to Amazon's first-party retail sales, and third-party sellers. Leigh was an Amazon general manager and retail category leader for nearly 10 years.

See GeekWire for more show notes and links to the topics we discuss.

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Prime Day: What's at stake for Amazon this year