Did Amazon Prime Day Live Up to the Hype?

When Amazon, the world’s largest eCommerce company, experienced a technical hiccup during its massive annual 36-hour sale this week, one might wonder if the eCommerce apocalypse is upon us. Amazon historically does not fail. However, this year, it did.

As seen below, you can see the 404 error that was shown to unlucky shoppers and how Amazon addressed the issue on their Twitter account.

Image Source

The 404 error revealed itself to shoppers just 15 minutes after the sale began. Some shoppers found themselves ready to check out and pay for the items in their cart, but unable to complete a purchase.

What went wrong? According to CNBC, Amazon failed to secure enough servers to handle the massive traffic surge. There was also a breakdown in the company’s internal system known as Sable, which provides computation and storage services to its retail and digital businesses.

While Amazon itself hasn’t reported on the potential financial losses that resulted from the approximately 75-minute outage, experts told TechCrunch that it could amount to 1.2 million lost per minute or up to nearly $99 million in total losses.

Considering that Bloomberg reported that “spending jumped 89 percent in the first 12 hours of the event on the e-commerce giant’s website and app compared with the same period last year,” the traffic surge was likely beyond what Amazon anticipated.

Despite the glitch, “Prime members purchased more than one hundred million products during this year's Prime Day event,” according to a press release issued on their website.

Perhaps the second most interesting fact post sale is that Amazon “welcomed more new Prime members on July 16 than any previous day in Amazon history,” according to the same press release, indicating that Prime membership bubble won’t burst anytime soon.

Other noteworthy highlights of the sale, according to Fortune, included:
 

• Customers purchased more than 5 million toys -- a 1.5 million increase from 2017 -- a result of the Toys “R” Us fallout?
   

• Prime members in 17 countries took part in the bargain hunting.
   

• Members bought more than 300,000 Instant Pots, the top selling non-Amazon device in the U.S.

Did you participate in selling during Prime Day? Schedule a call with our team to learn how Systum can help your eCommerce company sell across a variety of channels, including Amazon.