Prime Day Shows Amazon Is So Powerful It Can Make Up Its Own Holiday

Today is Amazon's second annual Prime Day, the made-up shopping holiday where Amazon makes hundreds of thousands of discounted deals available to Prime members. And chances are it will go even better for Amazon this year than it did the last. Amazon launched Prime Day a year ago to commemorate its 20th anniversary, and in spite of what many subscribers viewed as a rather lame product lineup, the company said it sold more on Prime Day than on Black Friday in 2014--34.4 million items sold, or 398 per second. Beyond the sheer number of deals, Prime Day reveals much about Amazon's deeper strategy for selling more. Amazon keeps oiling its logistics machine to make delivery faster: this year customers in more than 25 US metro areas will be able to get their Prime Day hauls in an hour or less via Prime Now, Amazon's superfast same-day delivery service.