This tremendous transformation certainly did not happen overnight, but over the span of two decades, and the impact thereof is reflected in exponentially growing annual revenue worldwide. Across Europe as well, Amazon and its various services are favored by consumers. In the UK, for instance, Amazon net sales doubled since 2013, and currently the country is Amazon’s second biggest market in Europe after Germany. The United Kingdom also happens to be the leading European location where Amazon has the highest number of fulfillment services. In the UK, the company operates its supply chain and logistics operations as Amazon UK Services Ltd., with income exceeding 70 million British pounds as of December 2018. The current employee number at Amazon UK Services stands at 22 thousand, which is ten times higher than it was a decade ago.
The popularity of Amazon devices and services such as virtual assistants and Prime Video with UK consumers also highlights Amazon’s success in this market. In 2018, Alexa-enabled Amazon devices were the most prevalent voice activated smart speakers in UK households by an overwhelmingly large margin, and 2019 is forecast to confirm that. Amazon Prime Video membership in the UK is picking up pace as well, with nearly one in every six UK households subscribing to Amazon’s video streaming and home entertainment platform.
Amazon knows how to attract more and more shoppers while at the same time imprinting its brand on an even wider scale. Amazon Prime Day is one good example of that. Originally started in 2015 to celebrate the company’s 20th birthday on 15 July, Amazon Prime Day has now become a highly anticipated two-day shopping festival with special deals on offer for Prime members. Compared to the year prior, 2019 was a better success story for Prime Day in the UK. More visitors on Amazon’s UK platform went for actually purchasing products, increasing the conversion rate to 9 percent this year.
While there is no limit to the range of products on sale that day, the majority of shoppers went for Amazon’s own brand consumer electronics in 2019. This trend was also observed among Amazon shoppers on Black Friday and Cyber Week in 2018, another wildly popular global shopping event. That year, Amazon processed about 4.22 million transactions on Black Friday alone. As for Cyber Monday, which followed immediately on November 26, the number of transactions made on Amazon in the UK was just shy of another 4 million.
