Amazon Prime Day has gotten off to a rocky start following online complaints of the website being down and several consumers being unable to complete their orders.
The majority of the complaints have so far been made in the US, where Prime Day began at 3pm ET on Monday. Within a few minutes complaints began to surface on social media, with some consumers saying they were simply taken to Amazon’s error page when logging onto the site, and others being able to select items but not check out.
Amazon quickly fired off a tweet saying it was tackling the problem, which was due to many more consumers shopping in the first hour than last year. It added that many consumers “were shopping successfully”.
— Amazon.com (@amazon) July 16, 2018
According to Coresight Research, this year’s Prime Day could be worth US$3.4 billion globally. The company’s share price slid 1.5% in after-hours trading in New York yesterday following news of the glitches.
Campaign Asia-Pacific contacted Ogilvy Singapore, which handles Amazon’s local PR, to find out more about local market problems as Prime Day made its debut in the Lion City this year. The agency had contacted Amazon, which had not replied by press time.
As well as venting their frustrations at Amazon, many consumers are sharing and commenting on the so-called ‘dogs of Amazon’ that appear on the company’s error page. It seems even in a crisis, the mantra ‘give the people what they want’ holds firm, and in this case it’s cute puppies.
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