This year's 48-hour Amazon Prime Day is the longest one yet (AMZN)

• Amazon Prime Day, Amazon's middle-of-July sales bonanza, will start on July 15 and last two full days.
• It offers steep discounts on a variety of products, similar to a Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale.
• In 2018, Prime Day became the largest sales event in Amazon's history, but it was leapfrogged by Cyber Monday later in the year.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Amazon Prime members won't have to wait much longer for their favorite day of the year.

Amazon announced on Tuesday that its annual sales bonanza known as Prime Day will start on Monday, July 15 and last a full 48 hours.

Last year, Prime Day was Monday, July 16 and lasted for 36 hours. Amazon's website nearly immediately crashed, remaining down for nearly an hour at the beginning of the sales event.

Read more: Amazon crashed for over an hour on its biggest shopping day of the year, likely losing millions in sales

Prime Day started in 2015 and has grown quickly. It's now one of the biggest sales days on Amazon's calendar, rivaling Black Friday and Cyber Monday in importance.

Last year's Prime Day was the biggest shopping event in Amazon's history at the time, with shoppers in the US gobbling up Amazon's own devices like the Fire TV Stick as well as the Instant Pot, the 23andMe DNA test, and the LifeStraw.

It was handily beat as a single sales day by Amazon's 2018 Cyber Monday sale, according to the company.

As Prime Day grows larger, its importance grows as well. Prime is increasingly important to Amazon, as members tend to purchase more items and more frequently.

Amazon also keeps adding new services and perks like Prime Day to keep members happy in the ecosystem.

"Prime delivers such massive scale and features that we believe it would be very difficult for any company to replicate and compete against, and Amazon continues to expand and add more value to Prime by adding new benefits and growing existing offerings," JPMorgan analysts wrote in 2018, arguing that Prime is actually worth $785 a year.

SEE ALSO: Amazon is making 3 small changes to its seller policies that add up to a big win for customers

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Contributer : Tech Insider http://bit.ly/2RvjZaj

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