#PrimeDay: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

As almost everyone in eCommerce knows, yesterday (July 15) Amazon celebrated it 20th year in business with an event that was billed as Black Friday in July — or Prime Day. So did Prime Wednesday live up to its November counterpart?

Honestly it is a little hard to say.

On the one hand, the people showed up to shop.

Amazon reports that “Prime Day” peak order rates passed that of 2014’s Black Friday. The company also claimed tens of thousands of sales, with Fire TV Sticks, 35,000 Lord of the Rings Blu-Ray sets, 28,000 Rubbermaid sets, and 4,000 Echo devices all reportedly selling in about 15 minutes. Which was a long time compared to the 10 minutes it took to sell all 1,200 of the $999 smart TVs that were up for grabs — and much longer than the single minute available to snatch up a Kate Spade purse.

And while Amazon can be expected to toot its own horn, third-party data seems to back up the claims. ChannelAdvisor reports that Amazon’s daily sales in the U.S. were up around 80 percent as of noon Eastern over last year’s figures, and sales were up 40 percent in Europe.

“We’ve been averaging year-over-year growth in the ~25 percent range, so this is a significant jump that we are already seeing mid-day,” noted Scot Wingo, ChannelAdvisor chairman, in a statement emailed to GeekWire.

However, Wingo added, “We are seeing some negative social media comments as the deals are selling out very quickly, and that can leave buyers frustrated when a lightning deal they are excited about goes out of stock.”

Yeah, about those negative social media comments.

While lots of shopper clearly loved the idea of Amazon Prime Day — as far as the Twitter verse was concerned, the execution left a lot to be desired. The promotion was accused of being a “garage sale” where Amazon was looking to unload the unwanted and boring contents of its warehouses onto consumers. It was also accused of being too limited, with many complaining the good and interesting deals (particularly on the electronics front) had petered out by 3 p.m. Eastern, leaving only those boring items that no one was getting excited about.

Which is just about where the “ugly” part started, as critics and haters got creative on social media.

Our favorite tweet was as follows:

“So what I’m getting out of this is that #PrimeDay is some sort of postmodern experiment to see if disappointment can be quantified.”

We also liked:

“@Amazon‘s algorithms are so advanced, I’ve been offered over 10,000 #PrimeDay deals and am not interested any of them.”

And in fairness, not everything said on Twitter was bad. Granted, almost none of it was good — but a very large potion of it was weird and an excellent insight into the type of person who got really into #PrimeDay.

“Bought two Roombas during #PrimeDay, and now I’m going to have them battle it out in my living room for my approval.”

Bet no one ever did that on Black Friday.



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