Amazon’s website was hit with massive technical glitches as its annual shopping holiday kicked off on Monday – jeopardizing an expected $3.4 billion sales haul over the 36-hour “Prime Day” sale.
Trouble began at around 3 p.m. Eastern time according to Downdetector.com.
Shares of Amazon began accelerating downward after the glitch, only to recover off the lows of $1,814 to close positive.
Several users were taken to the “dogs of Amazon” error page and were unable to enter the site, while others were caught in browser loops that urged them to “Shop all deals,” according to CNBC.
Prime Day was projected to break records again this year, surpassing even the “tens of millions” of Prime members who shopped the discounts last year. Wall Street expected higher sales and a higher share price for Amazon as a result.
Amazon’s e-commerce sales in the U.S. are meanwhile expected to reach a staggering $258.2 billion this year, up nearly 30 percent from a year ago, according to a new survey from eMarketer that looks at the company’s sales by product category.
That means Amazon is expected to capture nearly half of the U.S. e-commerce market by the end of 2018, eMarketer said. The company ended 2017 with about 44 percent of the market. -CNBC
Industry analysts were projecting a haul of at least $3.4 billion for the 36-hour sale – over 40% higher than last year according to Coresight Research, however Monday’s outage may put a damper on the final figure.
Shoppers were miffed, though at least one person appreciated the dogs:
The @amazon glitch for #PrimeDay has me as nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I wanna buy some crap!
— Cowboy Kyle Croft (@CowboyKyle101) July 16, 2018
Also whoever came up with this brilliant idea at @amazon deserves a huge bonus…who can be upset with a website glitch during a sale when you get to see dogs 😍
— Nivi (@nivie) July 16, 2018
via RSS https://ift.tt/2uFkof3 Tyler Durden