Amazon’s Prime Day Gets Off To Less-Than-Epic Start

Dawn C. Chmielewski
Updated

Amazon’s invented July shopping holiday, Prime Day, got off to a less-than-epic start Monday.

The e-commerce giant’s website experienced outages in the U.S., with thousands of reports of problems flooding into DownDetector, a site that tracks service interruptions and outages.

Shoppers who went to the site looking to grab a sweet deal were greeted with images of cute dogs and a message that read: “Sorry, something went wrong on our end. Please go back and try again.”

“Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we’re working to resolve this issue quickly,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement to Deadline, adding that plenty of people have been able to make purchases.

Prime Day is Amazon’s annual sales extravaganza. It kicked off at noon Pacific time today and lasts for 36 hours — promising more than 1 million deals exclusively for Prime members.

Last year, it generated $2.41 billion in sales, and Coresight Research projected this year’s haul could approach $3.4 billion.

The retailer typically enjoys high levels of customer satisfaction, with 72% describing themselves as “extremely” or “very” satisfied with the service, according to RBC Capital Markets’ annual online shopping survey.

This sort of a glitch won’t boost satisfaction levels for Prime members, who tend to shop Amazon more frequently than non-members — 75% make purchases two or three times a month, according to RBC’s survey — and are more loyal customers.

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