Amazon Prime Day website crash ‘costs retailer over £75m’ in sales

The website crash experienced at the start of Amazon Prime Day has cost the online retailer over £75m in potential sales, according to sales aggregator site LovetheSales.com.

Amazon suffered a number of outages during the event which took place on 16 July; the Prime Day landing page was reportedly not functioning properly and a number of customers were led to an error page or back to the homepage when they clicked links. Some users also reported errors when trying to make purchases.

According to Downdetector.com, a site that tracks outages, Amazon.com was down for a total of 63 minutes during the 36 hours of the worldwide sale event.

Coresight Research said that the retail giant was projected to bring in £2.6bn during the Prime Day sales. With the company making £1,203,704 in sales per minute on the day, it was calculated that the time the site was down lost Amazon £75,833,333.

The crash was not the only thing adding to Amazon’s plight as people also protested against the sale over the company’s treatment of its warehouse staff, using the hashtag #BoycottAmazon.

Multiple customers took to social media to complain about the crash, with one person on Twitter who said: “Not only can I not access prime day deals but now my whole amazon site is down. #PrimeDay”.

Another asked if it meant they would get a refund on their membership: “@amazon still haven’t been able to shop your prime day deals because of your website being down. Does that mean you’re refunding my #primemembership? #PrimeDay #PrimeDay2018 #primedayfail”

@amazon still haven’t been able to shop your prime day deals because of your website being down. Does that mean you’re refunding my #primemembership? #PrimeDay #PrimeDay2018 #primedayfail

— Aimee Whiteley 🐀 (@dragonfly3085) July 16, 2018

Not only can I not access prime day deals but now my whole amazon site is down. #PrimeDay pic.twitter.com/Ijr5AUBlzO

— Kelly W (@kmoody23) July 16, 2018

https://twitter.com/infraredinf/status/1018936972658831362

amazon down on prime day heellpp #AmazonPrimeDay pic.twitter.com/IQRpr72iDw

— Lisa Scherzer (@lisascherzer) July 16, 2018