A second chance for success
Today is Amazon’s second annual Prime Day. While last year’s Prime Day promised users hundreds upon hundreds of bargains, it was largely a flop: users couldn’t navigate the site, the site was crashing, and the few “good” deals sold out almost instantly. This year’s Prime Day promised to be bigger and better, but is it?
Customer complaints before it even started
Before this year’s Prime Day even began, users were complaining that both the Amazon site and app were experiencing difficulties; whether this was due to an influx in users, or a problem on their end isn’t clear.
Amazon even acknowledged they were experiencing issues, stating in a Tweet, “Some customers are reporting difficulty with checkout. We’re working to resolve this issue quickly.” Not exactly helpful when Amazon’s Prime deals are time sensitive (you only have a certain amount of time to check out with your bargains or they’re removed from your cart).
Last year’s Prime Day sparked rumors that other retailers would begin having Christmas-in-July sales, but we’ve yet to see many retailers follow suit.
Even though many visitors were disappointed by Amazon’s 2015 sale, worldwide, Prime members ordered an average of 398 items per second.
This figure surpassed the retail giant’s Black Friday sales, so obviously some people were quite satisfied.
More variety this time around
This difference in this year’s Prime sales is the variety of items offered. From toys to electronics and everything in between, Amazon made an effort to offer at least one deal from nearly every category they stock. Amazon is offering over 100,000 deals today, with a new sale every five minutes. The best upgrade this year, is the ability to “watch” a deal via the Amazon app. This ensures that when the deal starts you get a heads-up to switch back to the app and make your purchase.
If you’re having a bit of trouble finding what you need on the Amazon home page, try switching to Amazon’s Gold Box page. Switching to this page allows you to sort and filter deals by price and type (like you can do within the app). There are also a few RSS feeds or browser extensions you can use to receive and read deal alerts.
In the end, people still want a deal
One thing is clear from Amazon’s Prime Day sales: everyone like to find a bargain. The problem seems to be that Amazon isn’t ready for the number of bargain hunters on their servers. If the annual Prime Day sales continue, Amazon may get a better idea of what users are looking for and how to keep a decent stock of sale items. For now, the sales seem to be a virtual fight-to-the-death for those $115 TVs and $2 socks.
While some of the bargains are great, Amazon definitely needs to work out a few of the kinks before next year’s Prime Day, at least in my opinion.
What did you think of this year’s Prime Day? Did you find any unbeatable bargains?
