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How Amazon Prime Day Compares to Other Shopping Bonanzas

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How Amazon Prime Day Compares to Other Shopping Bonanzas

How Amazon Prime Day Compares to Other Shopping Bonanzas

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Earlier this week, products were flying off their figurative shelves at a pace that is pretty unusual for the summer. That’s because July 11, 2017 was the third-ever Amazon Prime Day – and in just a 30-hour period, the online retailer was able to offload close to $1 billion of merchandise.

The biggest seller of the day was the Amazon Echo Dot, an entry-level product that allows customers to access the company’s personal voice assistant, Amazon Alexa. With a 30% discount, it outsold thousands of other heavily discounted items, propelling Amazon to a 60% increase in revenue over the previous Prime Day in 2016.

At triple the sales of a normal day, it’s fair to say Amazon Prime Day is big – but just how big, exactly?

How Does Amazon Prime Day Compare?

Set up to reward Amazon’s roughly 80 million Prime subscribers once a year, the $1 billion number is pretty impressive even on a grander scale.

Here are the e-commerce numbers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday for all U.S. retailers in 2016:

Shopping DayRetailerE-commerce sales% Increase (from prev. year)
Amazon Prime Day (2017)Amazon$1 billion (est.)60%
Black Friday (2016)All U.S. Retailers$3.3 billion22%
Cyber Monday (2016)All U.S. Retailers$3.5 billion12%

The fact that Prime Day revenue comes from only one retailer makes it quite impressive – especially considering the day falls in the heat of summer, rather than the holiday shopping season. The 60% growth figure is compelling as well, showing that Prime Day could eventually be the biggest U.S. shopping day of the year.

Singled Out by Alibaba

While Amazon Prime Day favors comparably in the U.S. market, it doesn’t even close when looking at single-day events abroad. That’s because since 2009, Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba has used the Singles’ Day “holiday” to promote sales during the slow period leading up to the Lunar New Year season.

In 2016, Alibaba raked in a whopping $17.8 billion of revenue from Singles’ Day alone.

See the steady growth of the event below:

Alibaba Singles' Day Revenues over time

The concept of setting a global record for e-commerce sales on Singles’ Day sounds a bit strange to us Westerners, but the hype around Singles’ Day is no joke.

The holiday is now a full-on festival in China, with star-studded ceremonies kicking off the 24-hour sales period. For last year’s event, even Kobe Bryant, David and Victoria Beckham, and band OneRepublic made appearances to help ring it in.

A Prime Opportunity

During just the first five minutes of Singles’ Day in 2016, shoppers spent as much money ($1 billion) as Amazon’s entire 30-hour event in 2017.

While that may seem daunting to match, Jeff Bezos has built his tech empire from taking advantage of big opportunities such as this. As a result, it’s likely that Bezos and Amazon both see Singles’ Day as something to emulate – a full-blown festival that could ring in over $10 billion in revenue in one day for Amazon.

After all, it’s already been done once by Jack Ma, so why can’t it be done again in North America?

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Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

We visualized the results of an analysis by the World Economic Forum, which uncovered the jobs most impacted by AI.

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Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools haven’t been around for very long, but they’re expected to have far-reaching impacts on the way people do their jobs. With this in mind, researchers have already begun studying the potential impacts of this transformative technology.

In this graphic, we’ve visualized the results of a World Economic Forum report, which estimated how different job departments will be exposed to AI disruption.

Data and Methodology

To identify the job departments most impacted by AI, researchers assessed over 19,000 occupational tasks (e.g. reading documents) to determine if they relied on language. If a task was deemed language-based, it was then determined how much human involvement was needed to complete that task.

With this analysis, researchers were then able to estimate how AI would impact different occupational groups.

DepartmentLarge impact (%)Small impact (%)No impact (%)
IT73261
Finance70219
Customer Sales671617
Operations651817
HR57412
Marketing56413
Legal46504
Supply Chain431839

In our graphic, large impact refers to tasks that will be fully automated or significantly altered by AI technologies. Small impact refers to tasks that have a lesser potential for disruption.

Where AI will make the biggest impact

Jobs in information technology (IT) and finance have the highest share of tasks expected to be largely impacted by AI.

Within IT, tasks that are expected to be automated include software quality assurance and customer support. On the finance side, researchers believe that AI could be significantly useful for bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing.

Still interested in AI? Check out this graphic which ranked the most commonly used AI tools in 2023.

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