Today sees one of the biggest online events of the year: Amazon Prime Day.

It’s 24 hours filled to the brim with discounts, as hosted by one the biggest online retailers. The reductions started last week in the run-up to the big day, and the discounts are available to both Amazon Prime subscribers and customers opting in for a free 30-day Prime trial.

Amazon isn‘t the only one cashing in, though. Last year, Prime Day was the sixth biggest online shopping day in the UK calendar, ahead of Valentine‘s Day. And an analysis of the UK‘s top 25 retailers saw an impressive 29.1 million mobile and desktop visits, of which only about a third went to Amazon. In fact, the online retailer itself has said that 30 per cent of its Prime Day deals are offered by third-party marketplace sellers on the site.

Prime Day joins a growing number of online shopping holidays. Where traditionally, shopping holidays have focused around existing calendar events like Christmas, Easter and Mother‘s Day, the boom in ecommerce has seen a growing number of retailers inventing their own shopping holidays to boost online sales. The biggest ecommerce holiday of them all in the UK is Black Friday, where digital spending went up last year by a whopping 259 per cent in a single day, as British consumers spent £1.1 billion. This ends up making November the peak month for the online retail industry, dictated by the proximity of Black Friday and Christmas. 

Yet while Black Friday was designed to kickstart the festive shopping season, retailer-owned shopping holidays like Amazon Prime Day are also in a position to shake up the UK ecommerce scene. We already know that 69 per cent of Britons do their holiday shopping online; Holiday retail ecommerce sales rake in billions and keep growing year on year. Consumers can‘t help but find shopping holidays irresistible, as evident by 20 per cent of shoppers surpassing their holiday budgets on Black Friday due to enticing bargains, and by 30 per cent giving into FOMO—fear of missing out on a good sale.

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Indeed, even the more traditional holidays affect ecommerce revenue. Mother‘s Day 2015 had consumers spending over a million hours online, browsing and purchasing the perfect present for mum. Meanwhile, this