Technical glitches mar Amazon’s Prime Day, threatening $4.6b haul

Amazon says this is their biggest Prime Day to date with 40 per cent more Spotlight deals in the United Kingdom than in 2017. That might be because Amazon’s storefront is down – according to many of us at CNET and a host of reports on social media – at a rather unfortunate time for the company.

Sales for the event are projected to shatter last year’s total by 40% and become Amazon’s new single day record, breaking its 2017 Cyber Monday haul.

Verdi, a service sector union, said workers in Amazon’s warehouses have suffered from physical and mental stress, as well as other health problems.

It’s a little better than the standard error message we usually get, but doesn’t exactly make up for the Prime Day deals we missed out on during prime Prime Day.

But Prime Day should be thought of for what it really is: a huge marketing event to push Amazon’s own products and offer them at prices so cheap it’s hard to not pick some of them up. Chains like Macy’s, Nordstrom, Best Buy, Walmart and Target to roll out their own promotions, said Charlie O’Shea, lead retail analyst at Moody’s.

Ebay is offering deals up to 60 percent off electronics.

It’s worth remembering that to get the deals you’ll need an Amazon Prime account which costs £7.99 per month or £79 per year. Online furniture seller Wayfair introduced Way Day in April, becoming its biggest revenue day ever.

As a whole, the Prime offering is one of the fastest-growing segments for Amazon’s bread-and-butter retail business. “The outage is especially problematic as many of Amazon’s Prime deals are promoted for a set window of time – something that could cause a great deal of frustration for potential customers”. It’s hoping to keep Prime attractive for current and would-be subscribers after raising the USA annual membership fee by 20 percent to $119 and to $12.99 for the month-to-month option.

“Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we’re working to resolve this issue quickly”. Want to try out Amazon’s Alexa?

But Amazon officials said the sale benefits brands large and small. As Telsey Advisory Group’s Joseph Feldman notes, the general boost in online traffic “should spill over to some competitors and boost sales on Prime Day”, although he admits that “profitability may prove challenging, despite a well-planned counter-promotion”.

When Prime Day kicked off at 3 p.m., excited customers were greeted by a stuck home page screen or pictures of a dog, instead of the Prime Day sale.