Amazon Prime members were primed and pumped to shop, shop, shop on what was to be Amazon’s Super Bowl of shopping, Amazon Prime Day…until the go-time of 3 PM Monday when the site crashed.
Apology pages showing images of happy dogs with the words “Uh-oh. Something went wrong on our end.” popped up instead of search results, items in shopping carts disappeared and members quickly let Amazon have it on social—and it wasn’t pretty. Problems continued most of the day. The promotion lasted 36 hours and was predicted to reach $3.4 billion in sales this year, according to retail think tank Coresight Research.
Multichannel Merchant reported that an Amazon spokesperson told CNN Monday night that, “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.”
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The problems for Amazon didn’t end with the website glitch. Close to 2,000 workers in Spain walked off the job Monday over wages and working conditions. Boycotts were stages outside Whole Foods markets in attempts to pressure Amazon to stop selling Nazi, Confederate and white supremacist items, MultiChannel Merchant reported.
Amazon created Amazon Prime Day in 2015 to mark its 20th anniversary and as a way to draw more Prime memberships. This year, for the first time, Amazon reported that it had more than 100 million paid Prime members across the globe.
“The worst part about it is it’s just embarrassing. They’re supposed to be the best company in the world from a retail and e-commerce standpoint,” Sucharita Kodali, an ecommerce analyst at Forrester told CNN. “This just shows they’re human.”
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