Wayfair follows Amazon with its own made-up holiday: Way Day

NEW YORK (AP) - Amazon started Prime Day. Alibaba capitalized on Singles Day. Now another e-commerce company is hoping for success with an invented shopping holiday.

Online furniture seller Wayfair is calling April 25 Way Day and will offer discounts that it says are comparable to its Black Friday deals.

Those kind of days are a tactic online retailers use to try to increase customer excitement and boost sales. Amazon launched Prime Day in 2015 to mark its 20th anniversary and has brought it back every July since. Singles Day was started in the 1990s by Chinese college students as a version of Valentine's Day for people without dates, but it has since been closely linked with Alibaba, which adopted it as a shopping event about a decade ago. Both have become windfalls for the companies.

Wayfair, which is much smaller than Amazon and Alibaba, says it's holding Way Day in the spring when people tend to move or clean out their houses and may be looking to buy new home goods. It has also seen more competition from Amazon, Target and Walmart, which are selling more furniture online than in the past.

The Boston-based company says Way Day may return next year if it performs well.

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