Amazon Prime Day was retailer’s biggest sales day ever

Customers placed 60% more orders than last year

TUC's Hannah Reed cited examples of female workers who were told to leave warehouse jobs after telling their employer they were pregnant (Rex)

Amazon has said that its second annual Prime Day event was its biggest sales day ever.

Despite some glitches with customer shopping carts causing frustration early on, Amazon reports that sales were up 60% worldwide on last year’s event and up 50% in the US alone.

Unsurprisingly, it was also the biggest day for sales on Amazon’s own devices – order numbers on Fire TV devices were 2.5 times higher than last year, and the Amazon Fire TV stick was the biggest selling Amazon device globally.

Greg Greeley, Vice President of Amazon Prime said “We want to thank our tens of millions of members around the world for making this the biggest day in the history of Amazon. We hope you had as much fun as we did. After yesterday’s results, we’ll definitely be doing this again.”

Amazon didn’t provide any total sales figures for the event, which was open only to members of its Prime subscription service. Instead it offered some rough global numbers for product categories, stating that the event saw more than 90,000 TVs sold and over one million pairs of shoes purchased, as well as hundred of thousands of Kindle e-readers.

It also hasn’t been revealed whether the sale had a significant impact on the number of people signed up for Prime membership. Considering the company reported that last year’s event saw more people try the service than any other single day in Amazon's history, it’s highly likely that the success of this year will have resulted in further growth.

With success like this, it looks like Prime Day is set to become a new annual shopping holiday.