Amazon Highlights Small Business Ahead of Prime Day

June 8, 2021

With Amazon’s Prime Day event just around fast approaching, the company has launched an initiative to show its ongoing commitment to small businesses.

Notably, in the U.S. Amazon sells more than 7,000 products a minute with more than half of all products purchased on Amazon being sold by a small or medium business — making it likely that many consumers are already shopping from these businesses without even knowing it.

To help get customers shopping from small businesses and discover new ones, Kristen Bell, Mindy Kaling and Karamo Brown were each tapped to curate a list of their own favorite products from small businesses sold on Amazon for consumers to shop through. In addition, the initiative includes an incentivizing element for customers by offering Prime members a $10 credit to spend on Prime Day when they spend $10 with a small business on Amazon through June 20.

When asked why it was important for her to be personally involved in Amazon’s small businesses support initiative, Bell told WWD she wanted to see local communities thrive. “I know someone down the street or across the country has created a cool product, and I want to try it,” she said. “In general, I want to see someone’s dreams come true. I feel like innovations are at their finest with small businesses right now.”

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Notably, Bell has created her own businesses and knows how hard it can be to get started. “As an entrepreneur, I also know the difficulties involved in infrastructure,” Bell said. “In anything I’ve done, whether it’s Hello Bello or Happy Dance, the quality of the product is first but a very close second – if not a tie – is accessibility. Amazon gives these small businesses the resources they need to not just survive but thrive.”

Further, the actress laughingly told WWD, “Amazon is ‘The Good Place’ for small businesses. If anyone has a better idea as to how to get their products to their customers fast, I’d love to hear it. Right now, Amazon is the most efficient direct-to-consumer partner that a small business could have, and small businesses deserve that efficiency.”

Bell’s curated list includes products from Contraband Sports, snacks from Rule Breaker and dog treats from Pawstruck, among other small business picks.

“I order a lot from Amazon and I always try to support the small businesses in their store,” Bell said. “I really wanted to pick a vast array of products and focus on supporting Black-owned, minority-owned and female-owned. As a family, we go camping quite a bit and use these things called LuminAIDs, a female-founded and minority-owned business, that creates solar-powered foldable lanterns that you can take when you leave the tent at night. I also chose Pawstruck and actually spoke recently to the founder Kyle Goguen — who is a dog lover like me. He wanted to create dog treats that don’t include artificial ingredients for your pets. Our dogs are fans.”

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