Amazon Prime Day Sales Up 89 Pct From 2017

Despite glitches in the early hours of Prime Day 2018, Amazon’s Prime Day sales event appears to be off to a strong start.

Yahoo News, citing Feedvisor, reported spending during the first 12 hours of the 36-hour long event increased by 89 percent when compared to the beginning hours of last year’s Prime Day. Amazon’s Prime Day 2018 will last six hours longer, and includes the addition of four more countries as well as deals in its Whole Foods Market stores. Amazon backed Feedvisor, saying that sales during the first 10 hours of Prime Day were up compared to a year ago.

Amazon disclosed in the statement that it sold millions of devices that work with Alexa, its voice-activated digital assistant. The most popular items so far include the Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote and the Echo Dot speaker, noted the report.

According to the Feedvisor data, the glitches with Amazon’s website and app only hurt sales in the early hours of the event, and Amazon quickly recovered.

Shortly after 3:00 p.m. EST, Amazon Prime Day’s official launch time, the main Amazon site on desktop and mobile began to experience periodic outages, as customers rushed a little too en masse to fill their carts at Prime Day savings. Downside: Customers had a hard time getting to those savings. And it seems desktop and mobile weren’t the limits of the trouble — according to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages, Amazon’s Alexa, Prime Video Services and Amazon Web Services also experienced brief outages.

Amazon told CNN that the issues were real, but being resolved, and that the problems were not really slowing down the Prime Day commerce all that seriously. “Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we’re working to resolve this issue quickly. Many are shopping successfully — in the first hour of Prime Day in the U.S., customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year. There are hundreds of thousands of deals to come and more than 34 hours to shop Prime Day.”