Despite shopping cart snafus, sales soar for Amazon Prime Day 2016
The 2016 Amazon Prime Day was the online retailer’s ‘biggest day ever,” with orders up 60 percent worldwide, according to company sources. This success came despite a series of snafus that plagued the shopping cart feature throughout the day.
“Led by strong growth internationally, we are seeing more than 30 percent increase over last year in the number of items sold by small businesses and sellers on Prime Day,” Amazon said in an e-mail, reflecting sales as of 3 p.m. New York time on July 12th. “We are expecting a record day for small businesses and sellers on Amazon with many more deals to come today.”
One reason for this year’s success was that the company offered more deals and deeper inventory than last year, relying on thousands of third-party merchants who sell goods on Amazon to deliver. More than 2 million third-party sellers use Amazon, according to Bloomberg. Prime Day also spotlighted Amazon’s artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant, Alexa, offering exclusive deals to members who used the platform to place orders.
And the e-commerce giant learned well from its first Prime Day in 2015.Colin Sebastian, analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. told Bloomberg, “Amazon learned a lot from last year’s stock-outs in terms of planning for the event this time around. In addition, Prime membership continues to grow, which feeds a larger number of shoppers onto the site and mobile apps.” In fact, research predicts that half of all Americans will be Amazon Prime Customers by the year 2020.
The tremendous influx of shopper traffic again resulted in technical glitches this year, as it did in 2015. Shoppers turned to social media to vent their frustration using the hashtag #PrimeDayFail, with the main complaint that shoppers could not add items to their digital shopping baskets. Twitter user Giselle Mazur wrote “@Amazon my cart continues to fail. Very disappointed. There are some great deals that I’m missing.”
Yet, despite the glitches, shoppers continued to engage all day, as demonstrated by the final figures. In all, Amazon reported that Prime members around the world saved more than double on deals over Prime Day 2015, and Prime member orders on the Amazon mobile app surpassed Prime Day 2015 app orders by more than two times, with more than a million consumers accessing the Amazon app for the first time ever.
Prime Day 2016 deals included more than 100,000 discounts on products from electronics to toys and books to digital movies and even personal services like housecleaning. Retail advisory firm FBIC forecasts that Prime Day 2016 could generate $525 million in total sales, up 26% from estimates of $415 million last year.
The event was so successful, Amazon pledged to bring back Prime Day in 2017... and likely beyond. “We want to thank our tens of millions of members around the world for making this the biggest day in the history of Amazon," said Amazon Prime Vice President Greg Greeley in a press release. "After yesterday’s results, we’ll definitely be doing this again.”
“Amazon created this ‘holiday’ out of thin air a year ago, and so far Amazon has replicated the success of last year and grown pretty substantially internationally,” wrote ChannelAdvisor co-founder and executive chairman Scot Wingo in a blog post Tuesday. “Also this year, the search behavior has changed. Last year, when you clicked on a Prime Day promotion, you saw 5-10 results of Prime deals and then normal non-deal Amazon listings. This year, when you click on a Prime Day promotion, a filter is applied and all you see are Prime Day deals. This filter could be minimizing the spillover to non-Amazon sellers.”
