Amazon Prime Day 2017 Dashes Record, Expands Memberships
posted Sunday Jul 16, 2017 by Scott Ertz
For the 3rd year in a row, Amazon hosted a full day of sales aimed at their Prime members. This event has had varying degrees of success, with the first year being a complete dumpster fire. Unlike 2015's 55 gallon drum of lube or "female urinal," 2017 offered mostly products that someone somewhere would be looking for. That did not stop the #PrimeDayFail hashtag from making an appearance, though (you've got to love the horse grooming block).
Even though there were some oddities and issues, Amazon was more than pleased with the day. In fact, the company announced that Prime Day 2017 was their single largest sales day in company history, claiming the mantle from Prime Day 2016 by quite a margin. In fact, 2017 exceeded 2016 by more than 60 percent. Even when you consider that Prime Day was more than 20% longer this year than last, they still came out way ahead. July 11, 2017, also heralded the most number of new Prime members of any single day in company history.
While the top product of the day was the Amazon Echo, and the highest sales for any TV in company history was the Element 55 with Fire TV, there were some very popular non-Amazon products, too. Some products, like the Instant Pot in US and Canada make sense, others are pretty weird. For example, the #2 product in Canada was an 8-pack AA batteries, and the top 2 products in Japan were whey protein and bottled water.
Prime Day did not go off without problems, though. Many people experienced problems trying to watch deals on the evening of the 10th, getting repeated failures due to overloaded servers. This does not make Amazon Web Services look great as a service, considering Amazon can't even load balance their own content, let alone customers' servers. Other people noted that some prices were higher during Prime Day than they were before the "sales" began. For example, Merrell Men's Vapor Glove 2 Trail Running Shoe 9.5 D was on sale for $85, but a user bought the shoes on July 8 for $56, and today they are available for $70, with a lowest price of $50. Other products were erroneously marked as free, such as Star Wars miniatures.
One of the more bizarre issues on Twitter was a woman named Zeina Koinis‏ who claimed repeatedly that some technical glitch on Amazon's part resulted in an issue that put her family's business in jeopardy. Someone from Buzzfeed reached out to her on Twitter, but no article was ever published. Most of her tweets are in response to a post by another user, StevenKoinis, whose original tweet has been removed. There is no telling what might have happened, if anything, but it seems that whatever it was turned out to be less than presented.
Despite the issues, clearly Amazon had a positive day, in the middle of the summer, when sales are traditionally lower. Let us know about your Amazon Prime Day experiences in the comments.
