In 2024, online US shoppers spent an estimated $10.8B on Black Friday and another $13.3B on Cyber Monday. Amazon captured roughly 37.6% of that spend (roughly $9B). And this is only one slice of the picture. Amazon processes around 149 orders per second (4.69B per year), powered by a base of more than 200M Prime members, with an estimated 80% penetration in U.S. households.
These are stats most people hear and then immediately move past, but when almost the entire country is already a Prime household, Black Friday stops being a sales event and becomes a behavioral event. Amazon isn’t trying to just maximize a weekend; they’re using the weekend to train the system that drives the next 12 months of revenue for their entire company.
So I broke down the entire system Amazon uses to turn Black Friday into a 12-day optimization loop, and turned it into a 7-part framework marketers can learn from, including how they capture billions of signals, recalibrate their personalization engine, reinforce Prime, and drive category expansion.
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