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How Did Amazon Spin This Year's Prime Day Sales?

1 month ago
"Amazon stretched out its annual Prime Day sales event so that it lasted four days — twice as long as in the past — and, as a result, blew away previous sales figures," reports USA Today: Spending for [the four-day] Prime Day amounted to "more than two Black Fridays — which drove $10.8 billion in online spending during the 2024 holiday shopping season — and sets a new benchmark for the summer shopping season," Adobe said in a news release. The total also surpassed Adobe's pre-Prime Day estimate of $23.8 billion in sales. But an article in Fortune notes that "what stood out to this longtime Amazon watcher is that the company didn't disclose anything about the number of items sold." The last time it made that choice was 2020, when nothing normal was happening anywhere in the world, and Prime Day was moved from summer to October. Before that, you have to go back to the second-ever Prime Day in 2016 to find a wrap-up that didn't provide any update on the number of "units" sold. It's unclear exactly why Amazon decided to withhold that number for 2025, but this Prime Day was odd for a few reasons. Sellers, and brands big and small, had to come up with different strategies to contend with tariff chaos. And they're trying to woo increasingly pessimistic consumers. Those factors could be weighing on the company's decision to withhold exact numbers. Instead Amazon's official Prime Day recap swapped in some unusual alternate statistics. For example, Amazon reported that if you added up all the discounts given to customers over the four-day event, it was larger than any previous total amount of all discounts given to customers (over the earlier two-day events). To be sure, it's possible that this Prime Day was a success. An outside analysis from Adobe estimated that sales across online retailers overall increased by more than 30% during this year's four day Prime Day period, compared to last year. And Amazon said in this year's recap that the four days of Prime Day 2025 outsold any other four-day period that included previous Prime Days. But historically, the event hasn't run longer than two days. That means that previous years have included two prime days and two regular days, while this year included four prime days. It's unclear why the company would change the basis of comparison. Amazon "declined to comment on the absence of specific product sales tallies for 2025," according to the article (while pointing Fortune instead to an Amazon blog post with facts about past Prime Day events.) But in a sign of the time, Amazon's announcement notes that their Prime Day customers found deals and other product information using Amazon's AI-generated buying guides, as well as an AI-powered shopping assistant named Rufus and Alexa+ — Amazon's next-generation personal assistant ("now available in Early Access to millions of customers"). Another interesting statistic? USA Today notes that "a majority of shoppers (53.2%) made purchases on mobile devices, compared to on desktop computers, accounting for $12.8 billion of the spending, according to Adobe."

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EditorDavid

Kill Russian Soldiers, Win Points: Is Ukraine's New Drone Scheme Gamifying War?

1 month ago
ABC News reports that Ukrainian drones struck Moscow last night — over 100 of them — closing all four of Moscow's international airports and diverting at least 134 planes. And Ukrainian commanders estimate that drones now account for 70% of all Russian deaths and injuries, according to the BBC — which means attacks on the front line are filmed, logged, and counted. "And now put to use too, as the Ukrainian military tries to extract every advantage it can against its much more powerful opponent." Under a scheme first trialled last year and dubbed "Army of Drones: Bonus" (also known as "e-points"), units can earn points for each Russian soldier killed or piece of equipment destroyed. And like a killstreak in Call of Duty, or a 1970s TV game show, points mean prizes [described later as "extra equipment."] "The more strategically important and large-scale the target, the more points a unit receives," reads a statement from the team at Brave 1, which brings together experts from government and the military. "For example, destroying an enemy multiple rocket launch system earns up to 50 points; 40 points are awarded for a destroyed tank and 20 for a damaged one." Call it the gamification of war. The article concludes that the e-points scheme "is typical of the way Ukraine has fought this war: creative, out-of-the-box thinking designed to make the most of the country's innovative skills and minimise the effect of its numerical disadvantage." And "It turns out that encouraging a Russian soldier to surrender is worth more points than killing one," the article notes — up to 10x more, since "a prisoner of war can always be used in future deals over prisoner exchanges." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EditorDavid