At the stroke of noon (or 3 p.m. EDT), Amazon’s big mid-year Prime Day sale was due to start.
Instead of great deals on gadgets, beauty products, outdoor gear and a gazillion other items, many Prime members were met with a cute dog and a message: “Sorry, something went wrong on our end.”
So, do you blame the dogs of Amazon or the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos?
Countless people on Twitter (and editors here at the Southern California News Group) are reporting an endless loop “Shop All Deals” (that would be nothing) on various Prime Day landing pages.
Janeen Butcher was among the hundreds of stalled shoppers who reported her frustration on Twitter. She wrote: “#PrimeDay2018 thank you @amazon for helping me not impulse buy things I don’t need. Your sale and site breaking down helped me more than therapy.”
“Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we’re working to resolve this issue quickly,” Amazon said Monday on Twitter, adding that “many are shopping successfully.” The company’s stock closed at $1,822.49 but slid about 1.5 percent in extended trading in New York.
Some of the site’s deals pages began loading around 2 p.m., Pacific time.
The issues weren’t limited to shopping. Thousands of people reported losing connections with their Alexa digital assistants via Echo voice-activated speakers and having trouble streaming Prime Video, according to Downdetector. Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing division, reported global problems with its AWS Management Console, one of its tools. Thousands of big companies rely on AWS to run their websites.
“I’m candidly shocked that they’re not prepared for the traffic,” Forrester analyst Sucharita Kodali said. “Unless this is way beyond their wildest expectations, it’s just odd.”
As of Monday afternoon, there were 4,670 social media posts about the Prime Day crash. Eighty percent of online sentiment about Prime Day conveyed anger or sadness, according to Crimson Hexagon, which monitors social-media feedback.
It wasn’t clear how widespread the problem was, and users were reporting different problems. Some people were seeing the “dogs of Amazon” notification that the website wasn’t working, while others said they could add items to their shopping carts, but the Prime Day discount price wasn’t reflected at checkout. For some, clicking on various promotions just brought the person back to the home page. And some shoppers reported not having any problems at all.
The problem is most likely a bug in a software update that should be fixed within hours, said Antony Edwards, chief technology officer at Eggplant, which monitors website performance. Amazon rarely has trouble handling high traffic volumes and its security is unlikely to be breached by a hacker, he said.
Amazon’s annual “Prime Day” promotion is supposed to focus on new products, bringing Whole Foods into the process and persuading subscribers that Prime membership is worth the coming price hike. Shoppers, meanwhile, (when servers wake up) will have plenty of sales to choose from as other retailers offer promotions to try to take a share of the spending.
Amazon is highlighting its Echo assistants and its own brands, particularly in clothing, said Deborah Weinswig, CEO of Coresight Research.
While Amazon doesn’t disclose sales figures for Prime Day, Weinswig estimates it will generate $3.4 billion in sales worldwide, up from an estimated $2.4 billion last year. Prime Day also lasts six hours longer than last year. (Looks like they’ll need those extra hours, eh?)
Expanding Prime Day has increased the pressure on other stores and chains like Macy’s, Nordstrom, Best Buy, Walmart and Target to roll out their own promotions, said Charlie O’Shea, lead retail analyst at Moody’s.
“Brick-and-mortar retailers know that they have little choice but to continue offering their own deep discounts, which is evident in the proliferation of ‘Black Friday in July’ deals that are being launched earlier each year, as well as various ‘price match’ offers,” he said in a note Monday.
Amazon created Prime Day in 2015 to mark its 20th anniversary, and its success has inspired other e-commerce companies to invent shopping holidays. Online furniture seller Wayfair introduced Way Day in April, becoming its biggest revenue day ever.
Prime Day also usually helps boost the number of Prime memberships. Amazon disclosed for the first time this year that it had more than 100 million paid Prime members worldwide. It’s hoping to keep Prime attractive for current and would-be subscribers after raising the U.S. annual membership fee by 20 percent to $119 and to $12.99 for the month-to-month option.
Here’s a look at what’s happening this year:
WHOLE FOODS IN THE MIX: The Seattle-based company is offering Prime members who spend $10 at Whole Foods from July 11-17 a $10 Amazon credit to use on Prime Day. And at its more than a dozen Amazon Books stores, discounts will expand beyond devices.
NEW PRODUCT LAUNCHES: Several companies have agreed to launch new products on Prime Day, Amazon says. Among them, a Fingerlings unicorn doll whose horn lights up and a Delta kitchen faucet that can be turned on through Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant.
PRIVATE LABEL PUSH: Amazon has been building its own brands, and it’ll be offering deals such as 25 percent off its Rivet furniture brand, which didn’t exist a year ago. Other deals include 30 percent off its Mama Bear diapers and baby products.
BACK TO SCHOOL: The company is making a big push in school supplies for Prime Day. It says customers bought more pencils, pens, notebooks, glue sticks, lunchboxes and backpacks on Prime Day last year than any other day of the year.
MORE COUNTRIES: Amazon has been expanding its Prime membership around the world, and four new countries will be a part of Prime Day this year: Australia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Singapore.
–Bloomberg and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bezos is world’s richest man
Jeff Bezos is the richest person in modern history.
Amazon’s founder’s net worth broke $150 billion in New York on Monday morning, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s about $55 billion more than Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, the world’s second-richest person.
Bezos, 54, has now topped Gates in inflation-adjusted terms. The $100 billion mark that Gates hit briefly in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom would be worth about $149 billion in today’s dollars. That makes the Amazon chief executive officer richer than anyone else on earth since at least 1982, when Forbes published its inaugural wealth ranking.
Bezos crossed the threshold just as Amazon prepares to kick off its 36-hour summer sales event, Prime Day. The company’s share price was $1,825.73 at 11:10 a.m. in New York, extending its 2018 gain to 56 percent and giving Bezos a $150.8 billion fortune.
–Bloomberg