Amazon is known for creating its own, exclusive sales holidays and events to boost its bottom line, as it has done with Prime Day – a day of sales which even tops Black Friday and Cyber Monday, at times. Now, it’s trying to recreate that magic with the debut of a year-end blowout sale it’s calling “Amazon Digital Day.” As the name implies, the new sales holiday will have a narrower focus: only digital deals will be included.
For one day only, December 30th, Amazon will discount over 1,000 digital items across its site in order to encourage post-holiday spending. The move makes sense as many consumers receive new gadgets as gifts during the holidays. Amazon’s digital items complement those newly acquired smartphones, tablets, computers, gaming consoles, and more, by helping consumers fill them with content.
According to the retailer, hundreds of movies and TV shows will be sold for 50 percent off, a number of top music albums will go for $5, a Plex Pass annual subscription – a popular service for cord cutters and those with large, digital libraries of their own – will also be discounted by 50 percent. A number of kids mobile games will be dropped down to 99 cents, while some video games will be up to 80 percent off.
Amazon will also use the sales event to promote its own services – in particular, its recently launched Spotify and Apple Music competitor, called Amazon Music Unlimited, as well as its new kids reading app, Amazon Rapids. The former will offer new customers a $10 discount, and the Amazon Rapids’ subscription will be 33 percent off.
There are still other discounts for things like comics, graphic novels, ebooks, and various subscriptions, like the workout channel Daily Burn, Qello Concerts, and UFC Fight Passes. Software and service discounts include Microsoft Office Home & Business 2016, TurboTax, Norton, and H&R Block.
The full list of Digital Day deals is much more extensive. However, there’s one big miss: Amazon isn’t using the event to discount its annual Prime membership, unfortunately.
Deal-tracking website SlickDeals has fairly criticized the content selection for Digital Day as only including older movie and video game titles. This echoes some of the sentiments around consumers’ impressions of Prime Day – that Prime Day was Amazon’s equivalent of an online garage sale, for instance.
But despite those complaints, people shopped Prime Day in massive numbers, making the 2016 event the biggest sales day ever (at that point), in Amazon history.
It’s not likely that the under-hyped Digital Day will draw in the same, large crowd, but it could still produce a year-end bump for Amazon’s sales, even if it’s featuring some outdated content.
Digital Day, of course, isn’t the first time that Amazon has targeted holiday shoppers with digital content deals. But in the past, these deals were launched ahead of Christmas and would end shortly after customers unwrapped their new gifts. This is the first time the retailer has ever offered a single day of more than 1,000 deals on its site, and the first time it has branded the shopping event as “Digital Day.”
Customers can sign up on the landing page to be notified of the event’s launch. Digital Day will run for 24 hours only on December 30th.
