By Nathalie Voit

E-commerce sales from Amazon’s annual “Prime Day” event helped push online spending to a new record-high this week as discount-hungry shoppers scoured the online retailer’s website searching for bargains.

According to data from the Adobe Digital Economy Index, total e-commerce sales on July 12 exceeded $6 billion, up 7.8% from one year ago. Tuesday’s spending surpassed the $5.1 billion in online shopping reported during Thanksgiving Day (previously the highest-grossing day of the year in e-commerce spending), helping drive a new record for online sales this year.

The two-day offering featured best-selling Amazon products such as Fire TV Sticks, the fourth-generation Echo Dot speaker, and Blink video doorbells at steep discounts for Amazon Prime members. Other top-selling tech gear included Beats headphones and the Apple Watch Series 7, according to consumer data company Numerator.

Adobe said the huge success of this year’s Prime Day event was due to generous discounts on Amazon items following months of rampant inflation and elevated online pricing at e-retailers.

“Shoppers saw an opportunity to stretch their buying power a little more and do some spending here,” Manager of Digital Insights at Adobe Vivek Pandya said, referring to spending on durable goods. “This is very focused on the level of discounting that kicked in around this Prime Day event. Consumers are responding because they have an opportunity to (save).”

Indeed, a study from Numerator revealed that about one in three customers bought a product they had been eyeing for some time during Prime Day after waiting for it to go on sale.

Numerator also said the average Prime Day customer spent $53.58 during the first 36 hours of the event, up $7.05 from 2021.

The record-high spending surprised researchers at Bank of America, who had expected spending on consumer goods to level off in favor of spending on services like travel.

Instead, Wednesday’s inflation report from the Department of Labor showed consumers pulling back on service-related expenses in June.

“Softer spending on goods has been part of our outlook for some time, but weakness in services was a surprise; we had been expecting a rotation in household spending away from goods toward services during re-opening as leading to more robust services outlays,” Bank of America said in a report, according to NBC news.

The sale ended on July 13.