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Amazon Suffers Glitches at the Start of Prime Day (techcrunch.com) 120

Posted by msmash from the call-IT-asap dept.
It's not just you. Amazon Prime Day started 15 minutes ago, and so far, it's not going well for Amazon. From a report: The landing page for Prime Day does not work. When most links are clicked, readers are sent to an error page or to a landing page that sends readers back to the main landing page. Direct links to the product pages, either from outside links or the single product placement on the landing page, seem to work fine. This is a huge blow to Amazon and its faux holiday Prime Day. The retailer has been pushing this event for weeks and there are some great deals to be had. It's not a good look for the world's largest retailer. Both the desktop website and mobile app are facing glitches, users said. Prime Day, which began just now, is a 36-hour shopping event. CNBC reports: Some users saw an error page featuring the "dogs of Amazon" and were never able to enter the site. Some got caught in a loop of pages urging them to "Shop all deals." Clicking the entry link for a specific category returned the user to the first page urging them to "Shop all deals." Some users successfully added items to their cart, only to receive an error message when trying to checkout and complete the purchase. Business Insider reports that several customers are threatening Amazon that they would cancel their Prime membership if the company is unable to resolve the glitches soon. Bloomberg offers some context on the significance of the any outrages on Amazon's website today: Trouble on the site spiked when the event began at 3 p.m. Eastern time, according to Downdetector.com, which monitors web trouble. Shoppers were expected to spend $3.4 billion on the site during the event, up more than 40 percent from a year earlier, according to Coresight Research.
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Amazon Suffers Glitches at the Start of Prime Day More

Amazon Suffers Glitches at the Start of Prime Day

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  • is it good or is it whack?

    • is it good or is it whack?

      China has an unofficial holiday named "Singles' Day", which has morphed into one of the biggest shopping days in China. Alibaba makes a killing on this day.

      So Amazon is trying to create such a day, hoping for massive "Black Friday" sales.

      Except, in China, folks can say, "Hey, are you single? I'm single! Let's buy some expensive useless crap online to give to each other!"

      In the US, saying, "Hey, are you Prime? I'm Prime!" . . . well, that just doesn't quite cut it.

      • is it good or is it whack?

        China has an unofficial holiday named "Singles' Day", which has morphed into one of the biggest shopping days in China. Alibaba makes a killing on this day.

        So Amazon is trying to create such a day, hoping for massive "Black Friday" sales.

        Except, in China, folks can say, "Hey, are you single? I'm single! Let's buy some expensive useless crap online to give to each other!"

        In the US, saying, "Hey, are you Prime? I'm Prime!" . . . well, that just doesn't quite cut it.

        Nothing is stopping you from buying a present for your single neighbor during Prime Day... Well, unless you are married, have a jealous partner, etc.....

      • In a way having a sale is an anachronism with internet/instant purchasing, if I need something I just find the best deal and buy it. So I don't really have anything that I need that I don't have and I would have to be really bored to log on to Amazon to find something to buy.

  • Problem is number of items (Score:5, Funny)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday July 16, 2018 @02:34PM (#56958700)

    Turns out they accidentally listed a number of items that was not divisible by only itself or one.

  • free advertising (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The local tv news stations all mentioned this Amazon 'event' -- I don't know why they don't provide the same free advertising to all other local and national businesses (Apple also gets this special treatment (I've never seen local broadcast news mention Dell is releasing a new Precision laptop, but they will often mention when Apple has new releases))

  • Inflation & Tariffs and likely more... (Score:5, Informative)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Monday July 16, 2018 @02:39PM (#56958740)

    Yeah - even pushing past the obvious technical errors - the deals aren't even close to good either - they're like low-grade department store sales.

    The guys on the Slickdeals forums are going through everything:

    https://slickdeals.net/ [slickdeals.net] ...and there's nothing really great.

    There's a couple of possible sources of this:

    1) Companies are just cashing in on the allure of the day, only offering lukewarm deals. I don't think that's all of it though, since you'd get at least a few breakout offers by the make-it-up-in-bulk sellers.

    2) Inflation is making it very difficult to offer those make-it-up-in-bulk agreements for a good sale.

    3) Tariff threats probably contribute a little too - but they're mostly targetted enough to not have too large a knock-on effect. They shouldn't be dampening the entire ecosystem like we're seeing.

    I think we're seeing a bit of a soft recession fear popping up, more than just inflation fears here. Many of these sale prices are higher than a lot of the normal prices - folks seem to be preparing for a economic winter here.

    Ryan Fenton

    • It's also the beginning of the fiscal year, and the middle of the calendar year. Nobody is stressing about making their numbers for the year at this point. At the end of the year, fiscal or calendar, you often see a lot more pressure on retailers to show sales good numbers, and reduce inventory carried into the next year.

    • Celebrate by buying the same item cheaper on Ebay and with free shipping.

  • *yawn* (Score:5, Funny)

    by llamalad ( 12917 ) on Monday July 16, 2018 @02:40PM (#56958748)

    "Prime Day" is played out.

    "Megatron Day" or gtfo.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Damned Decepticons!!

  • PrimeVideo was Working for Me. (Score:3)

    by Psion ( 2244 ) on Monday July 16, 2018 @02:41PM (#56958752)
    I just used PrimeVideo whilst eating lunch to continue my rewatch of Star Trek: Enterprise. The interface is all messed up and it took me a few clicks more than usual to get to what I wanted, but once there, the site streamed flawlessly. So that much is working, at least.

  • If Only (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Someone had a massive, globally distributed, computing platform that people could rent for a short time as and when needed..........

  • Post giving a shit about companies like amazon and facebook.
  • Stop feeding the consumerist maw that is devouring you.

    You all should be donating your money to making a nobody a billionaire [gofundme.com].
  • In ecommerce vernacular, this is a 'good problem' to have. In essence either they didn't plan properly for the load or the promotion is just super successful and exceeded expectations. The whole premise is to drive traffic to your website, and they got it in spades.

  • Ads! Advertising everywhere! (Score:3)

    by dknj ( 441802 ) on Monday July 16, 2018 @03:01PM (#56958890) Journal

    Now everyone rushes to amazon.com to click on a product to see....... a product page appear. Oh well since i'm here i might as well shop.

    Brilliant slashdot. Brilliant.

    -dk

  • See on the BBC

    Amazon Prime Day deals 'not what they seem'
    By Brian Milligan
    Personal Finance reporter
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/bus... [bbc.co.uk]

  • They're running it a bit longer than a day this year. Consider the extra time the beta while they work out the bugs. Course like most betas people might not come back when it's working.

  • It's fucked. However, as someone who sells on the platform and therefor spends a lot time there, it goes down more often then most people realize. Lots of reasons to expect they are using some super ancient code. The platform is all around not impressive.

  • ROFLOL, an hour and 15 minutes in and Amazon acts like any other Slashdotted site. The preeminent E-commerce site can't even hold a sale.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by wahini ( 559380 )

      Almost 2 hours in and Amazon shopping app still isn't working. It does seem like the regular web pages are working.

  • Looks like they were getting spammed by bots, as I had to enter a captcha just to get to www.amazon.com

    Too many people running bots to buy things cheap to resell after the sale.
    That's why we can't have nice things.

  • I was seeing this error until I logged in with the Amazon account I have which has Prime. Afterward, I saw it one more time, then a reload resulted in the page working.

    Soooo... login, mash F5 a few times.

    Site devs didn't test for the test case in which the user wasn't yet logged in, or failed to blow out their browser cache before doing that test.

    • I'm glitching and I am logged in. Hell, it keeps asking me to log in whenever I try to check out.
  • The deals are not that great and mostly off brand garbage.
    Or at least what I saw

    If youre a teacher or artist thou, might work out for you.
  • I logged on the website and put an item in my cart, but could not get past continue to purchase. Went to the amazon shopping app, item was in my cart and was able to complete purchase.

  • 404 error (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I knew right away they were having problems. 404 isn't prime

  • It is a mess over at Amazon today. Orders are not being processed due to a massive DDoS and workers are walking out all over.

    They should have called it D-DAY instead of Prime Day. I tried to place an order repeatedly for some items and kept getting this error...

    https://drive.google.com/open?... [google.com]

    Looks like Jeff got a kick in the nuts today.

  • For the longest time I couldn't even see anything in prime deals. Took over an hour to get that fixed.

    Now I can see them and add stuff to my cart. But when I try to check out, I get the error screen telling me to go back and go to my cart again. I do so, but have to sign back in before it shows my cart. Get the cart up, click to check out, and get the same error page again. Lather, rinse, repeat. For crying out loud, Amazon, it's not your first prime day. You have no excuses for screwing us over l
    • Hell, I can't even get the contact page to pull up. This is pathetic. If this is how you run Blue Origin, Bezos, then Elon Musk has nothing to fear from you regarding SpaceX.

  • What a flop. For the past three years, I've usually bought a few hundred dollars worth of stuff on Prime Day. This year? Pffft. I'm still looking for anything I even want, let alone anything I want that's an urgently-compelling great deal. Maybe the truly great deals just aren't showing up in searches under "Prime Day", but my reaction after searching for "mouse" (just to name one item I searched for) was, "Seriously? Am I supposed to be impressed right now?

  • Furious Amazon customers are threatening to cancel their Prime membership after the retailer's heavily hyped shopping holiday, Prime Day, got off to a rocky start.

    The Internet mob in full cry. I'd be keen on buying Amazon stock if they came out and replied "OK, please do. If this is your trigger, we are better off without you. We'll focus on improving service for the rest of our customers rather than waste time trying to please a small number of crybabies." Or at least something to that effect.

  • It also seemed to kill the Prime Video services for a while too.

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