Amazon Is Pushing Back Prime Day—This Is When It’s Supposed to Happen

Amazon’s annual Prime Day is like Christmas in July. Big-ticket items like electronics and housewares are heavily discounted, and the prices of those random items lingering on your wishlist have been slashed in half—or sometimes even more.

However, because of the coronavirus pandemic, Amazon has decided to push Prime Day back until September with the hope being that the company will be in a better place to manage mass shipments of non-essential items by the fall, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Amazon’s “two-day shipping” promise for Prime members has been tested by the pandemic, with frequent delays and longer shipping times. Though, Amazon is already allowing unlimited shipments of nonessential goods to its warehouses, Market Watch points out.

According to Reuters, the Prime Day delay will result in an Amazon stockpile of about 5 million extra electronic devices the company would have expected to sell sooner. Popular devices like the Echo speaker, programmed with the voice-controlled “Alexa” feature, are always in high demand, and now there will be more of them to sell on Prime Day this year.

Amazon always keeps the actual dates of Prime Day (usually a two-day event) secret until a week or two before the event, so there’s no hints yet as to when Prime Day will go live come September. And again, depending on the state of the pandemic, even the September date may be subject to change.