The Twittersphere Hates Amazon Prime Day

Indeed, one distinguishing feature of this sale was the unusual breadth of assortment compared to Black Friday. Basically the idea was to celebrate the company turning 20 and Amazon promised that customers would be greeted with sales that would rival those found on Black Friday, and while to a certain extent that was true, many customers have instead been rather upset with the items that were being sold.

Unhappy Amazon shoppers vented on Wednesday about its “Prime Day” sales, slamming the online retailer with the hashtags that included: #unhappyPrimeDay, #AmazonFail, #gobacktosleep, and #PrimeDayFail.

Both Amazon and Wal-Mart launched their big sales on thousands of products Wednesday morning at 12:01 am PT.

The abstract followed the script pretty closely: “On July 15th, it’s Amazon Prime Day”. Others didn’t like that the deals were only available for a limited time and in limited quantities.

It sure got people talking.

Adobe Digital Index said that 50 per cent of overall sentiment related to Prime Day on social media was about disappointment.

Doug Messer, 21, from Westchester, New York, was disappointed in the sale too.

He added that the company’s U.S. website sold 1,200 TVs costing $999 “in less than 10 minutes”.

“If you’re going to offer this, then you have to really do it right”, said Allen Adamson, managing director of branding firm Landor Associates.

While Douglas McCabe, analyst with Enders, said: “Amazon’s model privileges market share and so it is always deploying marketing techniques created to grow its share of the total retail marketplace as profitably as possible”.

Sales and data acquired from the back-end revealed the figures behind the disappointing sale.

By 2 p.m., Clavis calculated that 40 percent of the “lightning deals” of Amazon Prime had sold out, with the waiting lists already beginning to pile up.

The backlash was captured by one shopper who tweeted: “Now whenever something in my life goes wrong or I have a bad day, I’ll say I had a #primeday”. But a big sale like Cyber Monday, the busy online shopping day after Thanksgiving, or Alibaba’s Single’s Day, an annual sale in November, generates a lift that is two, three or five times normal sales. “Our customers know that every day is a great day to save at Walmart and they are flocking to our site”. “No”, she said. “Prime members have already bought tens of thousands of Fire TV Sticks, 35,000 Lord of the Rings Blu-Ray sets, 28,000 Rubbermaid sets, and 4,000 Echo devices in 15 minutes”.