Customers made orders on 34.4 million items in Prime-available countries.
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Well yeah, it’s not really a party until somebody gets the lube out, and Amazon has a huge customer base to satisfy so a small tube just wouldn’t cut it. Others griped about how quickly some items ran out, and many said that Prime Day saved them tons of money not by giving them great discounts, but by presenting items that were so lame that there was no temptation to buy them.
Yesterday’s much-vaunted Prime Day-which coupled a P.T. Barnum-style marketing blitz with a discount arms race-apparently went very, very well for Amazon. Meanwhile, thousands of Amazon’s connected speaker Echo were sold in 15 minutes, and Fire tablet sales topped Black Friday’s figures.
And some customers took the quirkiness of the day and its offerings in stride, with more than one person pointing out that Black Friday can be similarly disappointing, with the added danger of potentially being physically harmful. In fact, most of these so-called deals could have been found online anytime of the year and the rest weren’t exactly “steals”.
ChannelAdvisor, which has been independently tracking Amazon’s sales numbers, says that Amazon’s US daily sales were up 93 percent year-over-year versus July 16th, 2014 (to align with the same day of the week a year ago), and Amazon’s European Union daily sales were up 53 percent. Amazon announced Thursday its “Prime Day” sale led to a sales surge and “hundreds of thousands” of new signups for its $99 annual Prime loyalty program. Although the sale was only open to Prime members, Amazon offered free 30-day Prime trials so anyone could partake.
Despite online rumblings by some disgruntled shoppers that Prime Day was nothing more than an overhyped “garage sale”, Greeley said the event was a definitive success. The 1,200 TVs priced at $999 sold out in less than 10 minutes.
Amazon said it rang up sales of 56,000 “Lord of The Rings” trilogy Blu-ray sets, 51,000 Bose headphones and 14,000 iRobot Roomba vacuums. The company promised “more deals than Black Friday”. But in the short term, at least for Amazon, Prime Day appears to have been an enormous win.
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Walmart criticized Amazon for only extending the sale to Prime members and said its sale was meant to “stand up for customers”. “They haven’t damaged the trust people have in the overall Amazon brand, but they have done major damage to the credibility of sales announcements going forward”, he said.
