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Marketing Amazon

Amazon crashes just minutes into Prime Day

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By Kyle O'Brien, Creative Works Editor

July 16, 2018 | 3 min read

Amazon Prime's extended Prime Day (really 36 hours), didn't get off to the start the online retail giant may have expected. According to several reports, the website either crashed or had trouble loading pages.

Amazon Prime Day

Amazon Prime Day has technical glitches in first 15 minutes

DownDetector.com reported over 24,000 problems just minutes into the sale. It noted that website problems accounted for 46% while log-ins affected 34% of those reporting, and check out had a 19% problem. The site said stated that problems started at 3:04 pm ET, four minutes into the sale.

TechCrunch reported that the landing page for Prime Day didn't work correctly, and that when some links were clicked users were sent to error pages, which sent them back to the main landing page.

While direct links to product pages worked correctly, some users reported errors when completing a purchase as well.

As of 45 minutes into Prime Day, most problems seemed to be fixed, though the pages loaded slower than usual, but it's still a problem for a retailer that has hyped the day for weeks and received plenty of media coverage.

Social media was on fire with people reporting the issues, with many noting that cute dogs won't solve the problems or frustrations.

Prime Day tweet
Prime Day error tweet

Prime Day also encountered several problems last year, including issues with Alexa, and web slowdowns.

The latest news also came on a day that found that research on Prime Day launched by global eCommerce consultancy Salmon, a Wunderman Commerce Company, showed Amazon’s retail domination (particularly over Google), where they start and finish the consumer’s shopping journey.

Amazon’s retail dominance, particularly over Google, found these stats: 35% of all UK online spend goes through Amazon, 52% in the US; 51% of shoppers start their journey on Amazon (compared to 16% on Google) and 55% purchase their goods on Amazon, showing where you start is usually where you finish your shop. Also price (64%) and free delivery (54%) is considered more important than brand (39%) for consumers.

Marketing Amazon

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Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company based in Seattle, Washington that was founded by Jeff...

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