RetailTechNews’ weekly roundup brings you up-to-date research findings from around the world. In this week’s edition: UK Retailers Making the Most of Prime Day; Streaming Services Overtake Pay-TV; and Microsoft & Walmart Team Up. 

UK Retailers Making the Most of Prime Day

Amazon may have stumbled on its sales day due to labour strikes and tech issues, but it provided a Prime opportunity for other retailers to boost their own sales, according to data from Criteo.

Online UK retailers saw a 13% lift in sales across top-performing product categories during Amazon Prime Day, demonstrating the ‘halo effect’ the sales have for the industry as a whole.

Computing/high tech products performed particularly well, with sales increasing by 22% during the period as shoppers were drawn by cleverly timed discounts by retailers. This was accompanied by a 17% increase in browsing. Sporting fever continued to capture the nation, with sporting goods seeing a 17% jump in conversation rates.

It was a somewhat tumultuous Prime Day for Amazon, with periodic outages on desktop and mobile on Monday afternoon, right after the Prime Day sale began. Amazon is also looking to milk the day for all its worth, with an increase in the fee sellers must pay to have a presence on their site on Prime Day.

Streaming Services Overtake Pay-TV

Britain’s growing appetite for services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime has seen the number of subscribers to streaming services overtake those signed up to pay-TV providers such as Sky, BT, and Virgin Media for the first time.

The total number of UK subscribers to the three most popular online streaming services in the UK – Netflix, Amazon, and Sky’s Now TV – hit 15.4 million at the end of the first quarter this year. At the same time, the number of subscribers to pay-TV packages reached 15.1 million, according to a report published by media regulator Ofcom.

The milestone marks a major competitive shift in the TV industry, as the rise of the global internet firms and changing viewing habits, especially among younger viewers, is putting increasing pressure on the UK’s traditional pay-TV and free-to-air broadcasters including BBC, ITV, and Channel 4.

The Ofcom report found that the total pay-TV revenues of Sky, Virgin, BT, and TalkTalk fell for the first time in the almost a decade in 2017 to £6.4bn. By contrast, the dramatic increase in the popularity of the Silicon Valley streaming services in the UK fuelled a 28% surge to £2.3bn in what Ofcom terms online audio-visual revenues. Within this, subscription on-demand revenues – mainly viewers paying for Netflix and Amazon – leapt by 38% to almost £900m.

Microsoft & Walmart Team Up

Microsoft and Walmart are teaming up for a strategic partnership that will take on rival Amazon in both technology and retail. Walmart has announced that it is partnering with Microsoft to use the company’s cloud services. The five-year agreement will see Walmart use Azure and Microsoft 365 across the company, alongside new projects focused on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data platforms.

While the tech partnership will obviously benefit both companies, it also comes just weeks after reports suggested Microsoft is working on rival Amazon Go technology for cashier-free stores. Microsoft is reportedly in talks with Walmart for this technology, and the software maker has hired a computer vision specialist from Amazon.

This new deal could be a unique test ground for Microsoft’s bigger AI ambitions and any future plans it has to push other retailers to use its range of cloud services.

Walmart is Amazon’s biggest retail competitor; and Microsoft is Amazon’s largest cloud services rival. That rivalry isn’t lost on Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, who hinted in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that it’s “absolutely core to this” new partnership. “How do we get more leverage as two organisations that have depth and breadth and investment to be able to outrun our respective competition”, says Nadella.