After several weeks of promotion, Amazon Prime Day kicked off today exclusively for Amazon Prime members. If you aren’t an Amazon Prime member, you probably felt a sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), but trust me when I say you didn’t miss anything.
I spent the good part of my work day covering all of the notable deals from Amazon Prime Day while also handling bits of news here and there. I was focusing on gaming, gaming peripherals, and electronics sales, and at its start, there weren’t that many notable sales. Amazon started its big Prime Day event by putting Sports Champions 2 on sale for $9.99 and a Skylanders duffle bag.
Fortunately, things picked up slightly from there as we saw Battlefield Hardline, Borderlands - The Handsome Jack Collection, Evolve, and two recently-released Final Fantasy remakes go on sale. But none of these games have exactly been tearing up the charts as of late, although we’re sure there were some of you out there who probably picked one of these games up.
The only items I would consider to be good deals were Bloodborne at $29.99, the Xbox One 1TB bundle with Master Chief Collection and Borderlands, Alienware 17, and the LG 55-inch 4K Smart TV. Other than those, today’s Prime Day sales left many, many underwhelmed.
I’m not the only one that feels that way. If you search for the #PrimeDay hashtag, which was trending on Twitter today, here are just some of the tweets written today:
I'm ashamed to be an @amazon Prime member today. #PrimeDay #PrimeDayFail
— William Shannon (@dwmsb) July 15, 2015
#primeday is the epitome of what advertising has become, especially black friday type events. Overpromise and under deliver.
— John Ghazzagh (@mrghazzagh) July 15, 2015
If you think #primeday sucks in the states, check out the Canadian version (and that's not counting how bad CA Prime is to begin with)
— Hot Buttered Fury (@ToastCB) July 15, 2015
.@Amazon #PrimeDay, #MoreDisappointingThan Anchorman 2.
— Ryan Freddy (@fredrikryansson) July 15, 2015
#PrimeDay is bullshit. Thanks, Obama.
— Zorga (@lawyerboy_) July 15, 2015
What appears to be the problem here is the fact that Amazon over promised with its Prime Day and under delivered. If Amazon would have made today’s sale event more low key, less Amazon customers would have been upset. But considering they’ve been running numerous commercials for it on TV, radio, and on the Internet, it gained everyone’s attention, and unfortunately, Amazon didn’t have the deals to back up that amount of attention.
So Amazon - the next time you promote another big sale on your site, and throw the word “Black Friday” around, please consider your customers as many of us spent a lot of our free time keeping tabs on Prime Day in hopes there’d be a really good deal that never, ever came.
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Shacknews
replyDaniel Perez posted a new article, Amazon underwhelms and over-promises with Prime Day deals
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That's true. I was telling that to the other editors earlier today. Quality <<<<<<<< Quantity
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I think the biggest problem wasn't the deals it was the horrid way you browsed them. It was impossible to weed out the shit you wanted and find the stuff that you might have been interested in when you were looking at them 8 at a time.
I got some stuff but most of it was just happening to see that things we regularly buy (like dog treats) were on sale.
I don't really know what people were expecting, it's not like they were going to run a full day of sales where they took $200 hits on pricing of high end electronic items.-
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There was a dropdown menu to narrow the search to specific categories like electronics or dvd/blurays. It's just that the selection sucked.
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And the page wasn't updating... I clicked on the 40" tv six minutes after it popped up... "0% claimed"... hit add-to-cart... 'OUT OF STOCK'
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Agreed - for the amount of hype they generated, this was a pretty boring "event".
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I was really annoyed that some of their deals didn't even work by the normal conventions of their system. I'd been hoping to grab one of those cheap TV's for my bedroom, and usually a lightning deal has a countdown timer associated with it before it actually hits so you know when to expect the deal to go up. The "big" items like the TV's didn't follow that convention though, and instead just dropped with no warning making it impossible to get one since they sold out instantly anyway. Really poor form Amazon.
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Reviewing sales now?
6/10 -
Meh, I got $60 in assorted electronics accessories for $14. Sure they might have been on sale another time but I was happy enough with it.
