Updated! Amazon’s much ballyhooed Prime Day redux promotion has arrived, but the jury’s still out on whether the event is living up to the hype.
The world’s largest e-tailer — which just surpassed Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway in market value — promised more than 100,000 worldwide deals and twice the TV inventory of last Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, making it Amazon’s biggest sales promo ever.
But as some consumers griped last year after the inaugural Prime Day event, Amazon seems to be going for quantity over quality.
Not that there weren’t some great deals to be had. Top rewards for current Prime customers, and lures for would-be members, included Samsung’s UN55KU6600 curved 55-Inch 4K Ultra HD smart TV for $650 — an Amazon exclusive — and the flat-panel UN55KU6300 for a hundred bucks less (“This is not the 2015 Black Friday model that other retailers are clearing out,” Amazon stressed.)
Indeed, CE retailers did retaliate with some sharply priced TV deals of their own.
But a cursory review of the Prime Day sales suggests that much of the focus is on Amazon’s proprietary devices ($50 off the $180 Echo; $33 for a 7-inch Fire Tablet) with a heaping helping of refurbished inventory, while the vast majority of offers appear to be low-cost household items.
Moreover, many morning shoppers reported problems with the site’s checkout cart, which wouldn’t accept their selections. The resulting social media outcry led to Adobe Digital assigning a “sadness” rating of 37 percent to Prime Day, which is still well below last year’s 50 percent marker, attributable to that sale’s dearth of blockbuster deals. (The checkout snafu has since been resolved.)
Still, based on last year’s Prime Day performance, NPD Group’s Checkout Tracking service predicts that millions of consumers will buy something from Amazon today, with much of the spend on CE and accessories, and that thousands will sign up for Prime.
Sounds like a win to us.
