Amazon botched Monday’s kickoff of its fourth annual Prime Day sale, with a broken website and app redirecting customers to pictures of dogs on its error pages. For many shoppers, the problems persisted for hours. But the screw-up didn’t change the final outcome: a third Prime Day in a row that broke all previous Amazon sales records. On Wednesday, Amazon said his year’s Prime Day surpassed all prior sales records in the e-commerce giant’s 24-year history, including every Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For apples-to-apples comparisons, that record was weighed against other 36-hour periods since the sale this year was a day and a half. This record shouldn’t last long, though. Due to Amazon’s rapid growth, the company is likely to break the record again during the upcoming holiday season. Prime members worldwide ordered over 100 million products during Prime Day 2018, Amazon said. The best-sellers this year were Amazon’s own devices: the Echo Dot and the Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote. As with last year, Prime Day resulted in another new record for new customers joining Prime, the $119 annual membership that includes two-day free shipping. However, Amazon generally offers only vague information on its businesses, so it avoided specifying how big the sale was or the percentage growth from last year. In 2017, Amazon said the Prime Day sale grew by 60 percent over the previous year. This year, Amazon did mention that small and medium-sized businesses selling on Amazon exceeded $1 billion in sales. Coresight Research estimated that… [Read full story]
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