For civilians, Prime Day is a shopping holiday. For editors at the publications that drive audiences to Amazon in return for a percent (of a percent) of revenue, it’s something closer to a religious observance. Commerce editors — journalists trafficking in recommendations and reviews — plan weeks in advance. They set expectations. They set alarm clocks.
There’s money to be made.
In 2015, Amazon launched Prime Day as a 24-hour sale celebrating the company’s 20th birthday. The media hyped the event. Facebook bent but didn’t break. That day, people ordered more than 34.4 million items. It was huge. Then it got bigger. In 2019, people ordered 100 million items and Amazon extended the event to two full days. The next year, Prime Day sales surpassed the previous year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined. This year, consumers are expected to buy more than 100,000 items per minute.
Prime Day is an Amazon initiative, but it has become a media holiday akin to the Super Bowl or the Oscars. For this story, I interviewed four commerce editors, all of whom work for New York-based media companies with audiences north of a few million, about their experiences chasing deals and dollars. Each spoke on the condition that they remain anonymous.
One editor, who I’ll call Emma because I’ve always liked that name, was there at the first Prime Day back in 2015. At the time, it seemed like a reprieve. Historically, in her experience, covering Black Friday meant going to the Black Friday sales, which seemed to begin earlier and earlier. She left her Thanksgiving dinner table to tail frenetic shoppers down the aisles of box stores and across parking lots. Night turned to dawn turned to afternoon before she filed her story.
The reprieve didn’t last, though. The C-Suite noticed the size of the opportunity. Reporting on deals, such as it was, could be done from a desk, but there was a lot of hunting and pecking to be done. “It feels like it goes on forever,” Emma says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, great. I found 30% off this no-name suitcase.’ It’s not exactly fulfilling work.”
Prime Day should feel low-stakes. It’s about finding good products. But when revenue is on the line, the stakes often feel… not low. This ratcheting up of pressure has caused some adverse reactions.
“At one point on Prime Day, I was supposed to be online with one writer to help me, and she just ghosted,” Emma recalls, laughing. “She just disappeared. I don’t think I ever fully got an answer as to what happened. She was apologetic, but I think it was actually the fear of Prime Day that gave her so much anxiety that she just didn’t show up to work.”
Increased expectations — in terms of both content production and revenue — can spook even the most buttoned-up teams, too. “Prime Day has become a major event,” says another editor who is not named Katherine. “We started having planning meetings back in April. The whole month of June is dedicated to it, even though it’s not until mid-July. The sheer quantity of posts we do, now — there’s pre-Prime Day, post-Prime Day, the actual Prime Day, one-offs, and multiple round-ups. What videos can we make for Instagram? Who’s sending out emails? Where are we going to be on the homepage? It’s all-encompassing.”
It’s probably not a zero-sum game, but it feels like it and so there’s an arms race. The biggest bomb is time. “You’re spending weeks and weeks and weeks searching, combing the whole site.” says Alexandra, an editor at a digital home and lifestyle publication. “You get kind of crazy.”
Not Katherine blames her own company, and others like it, for the lunacy.
“I think we helped create this frenzy that if you’re not taking advantage, you’re missing out on something,” she says. “Without our coverage, I think your average consumer might go and look on Amazon and be like, ‘I don’t see anything that looks like the best deal.’ But when five different websites are telling you that if you don’t get an air fryer now, you’re never going to have a better deal? You’ll believe it. Even when we kind of know that’s not true.”
Emma echoes this sentiment. “I think our industry has become obsessed with covering Prime Day because of how easy it is to get people to shop and how easy it is to make commission,” she says. “I think it’s for the same reason that everyone shops on Amazon. It’s quick and easy. That’s it.”
That said, there are concerns, none of which we’re surfacing here for the first time. In recent years, Amazon has come under fire for allegedly inflating prices. Additionally, a 2022 study investigated a pricing practice in which an Amazon seller frames a price increase as a discount by simultaneously increasing the price and introducing a higher list price. The study found this was a “prevalent practice adopted by a broad range of categories and sellers.” Multiple editors interviewed for this story observed deceptive pricing — that an item that was framed as discounted was actually available for the same price at other retailers.
Tracy, an editor at a general assignment digital publication, has some advice for the Prime Day shoppers worried about getting the best deal: “I tell my friends and family, unless you’re buying a TV or a mattress, you’re not really getting a deal on anything,” she says. “Amazon is just going to mark up the prices and say that it’s a deal, but if you’d checked 30 days ago, it would have been the same price.” (Pro tip: Use CamelCamelCamel to see the price history of an Amazon item.)
Although no editors I interviewed said they personally enjoyed covering Prime Day, Emma says some colleagues do feel a sense of achievement: “I think there are some people, especially ones who maybe haven’t been covering it for as long, who feel that it’s their Super Bowl,” she says. “They’ll see themselves smash through goals and make tons of money.” There’s a pause.
“For the company, of course. Not for themselves.”
“At a recent press event I went to, there were tons of commerce editors,” Not Katherine adds. “Someone came up to me and said this was the fourth conversation they’d had about Prime Day in one hour. And I jokingly said, ‘Yes, should we make a drinking game out of it? Take a shot every time someone mentions Prime Day.’ We were all like, ‘Well, no — we don’t want to die.’”
When I talked to Alexandra recently, she was tired. Too much Prime Day on the brain. “I’ve lost too much sleep over this,” she says. “I’ve spent too much time recommending new products. You better buy something. You better fucking buy something.”
