Amazon’s Prime Day shopping bonanza was off to a rocky start. Amazon’s website experienced a number of periodic outages on both mobile and desktop on Monday afternoon just a few hours after the Prime Day sale began. Shoppers who were hoping to score a few great deals were instead met with images of cute dogs. This is Amazon’s standard error page when the website is down.
Despite the cute dogs, many shoppers took to social media to express their disappointment with the company. The issue largely appeared to affect Amazon products and services. Amazon’s Alexa, Amazon Prime Video Service and Amazon Web Services were all experiencing brief outages on Prime Day. Amazon acknowledged the issues later noting in a statement that there were indeed many customers who were having difficulties shopping. The company said that it was working to resolve the issue as fast as possible.
However, Amazon stated that most of the customers were able to shop successfully. In fact, the company said that during the first hour of Prime Day customers had ordered more goods compared to last year. The online retail giant also indicated that it was offering hundreds of thousands of deals and there will be 24 hours to take advantage of them. Customers who tried to reach Amazon by phone were met by an automatic response saying that the company was aware of the issues and that it was addressing it as fast as it could.
The website was later fully restored and despite this hitch, shoppers were able to continue exploring the deals on offer this year. Prime Day is the annual shopping bonanza offered by the online retailer. This special day is designed to give Amazon shoppers access to hundreds of thousands of discounted deals. This year Prime Day will last 36 hours as opposed to the 24 hours availed to shoppers last year.
Experts predict that sales on Prime Day alone this year will hit well above $3.4 billion. Prime Day is also an opportunity for Amazon to market its Prime services and try to sign up a new Prime Members. Prime Members get access to a number of exclusive services including streaming for a yearly fee of $119. It’s estimated that there are almost 100 million Prime Members around the world. Amazon has been trying to increase this number even more and Prime Day offers a good chance to lure new customers into this premium plan.
It’s very unlikely that the short-term outages experienced at the beginning of Prime Day will have an effect on the success of this shopping bonanza. However, the company is feeling some level of embarrassment that its site was on and off on the day that thousands of customers were trying to take advantage of limited deals on the website. After all, Amazon is considered the leader in online retail across the globe. Many experts argue that the company should have anticipated the spike in traffic on its website during Prime Day and measures should have been taken to make sure that such outages didn’t happen. However, all is fine now and there are still a few hours left until Prime Day comes to an end.
