Amazon Prime Day Crash Reveals Fallibility Of Online Shopping

By Bob Phibbs

Amazon Prime Day CrashAmazon’s website crashed as Prime Day 2018 kicked off. How does Amazon crash when people order from them 24/7 365 days a week?

Other retailers could say it was their servers fault, they weren't ready for the volume.

Amazon runs on their own AWS servers!

Let's not forget their promise that the deals were timed so imagine being one of those online shoppers trying to get the deal they wanted and getting an error message with a dog like this.


Just twenty minutes ago a tweet posted, "Site working, but I item that I was about to checkout before the crash is now out of stock. @amazon better find a way to compensate for this or I won’t renew my membership. Checkout still not working, though I can see prime deals now."

One of the great promises of online shopping is it is fast and friction free.

Amazon added both to their own created Black Friday-style promotion. They’ve told everyone it’s going to be this amazing thing and built up the expectations of great deals, but just like those Black Fridays when shoppers got stomped on, this is the equivalent for ecommerce.

This idea that online is foolproof and so much better than brick and mortar is not true.

Let's be clear...

No one ever expects Amazon to go down.

While Amazon might taunt brick and mortar retailers as being just slower, less efficient versions of online, on this over-hyped Prime Day, they added friction and sacrificed speed.

Brick and mortar retailers rejoiced at the news. 

Interesting that on the day Jeff Bezos became the richest man in modern history topping $150 billion, lunch hour for those working on the West Coast became frustrated more and more.

That's real money and a lot of time lost to all those shoppers for whom online was supposed to be frictionless.

This is a big black eye for the Amazon juggernaut.

Imagine going into a brick and mortar store and after you put an item on the counter, you were unable to checkout. You looked around and when you went back to the counter, you were at the front doors, your item and you kicked out.


Imagine being one of those shoppers clicking back and forth expecting the Prime Day crash to be fixed in seconds, not minutes.


Imagine being able to look in the window of your favorite store but the doors were locked on Black Friday.

And this crash also affected their video and music sites as well.

Yes, this is ultimately a customer service failure.

And when shoppers weren’t even able to go to the website or as the app crashed repeatedly, it may have instilled fear in some shoppers that something had happened like a terrorist attack.

After shopping is the future and Amazon is infallible...isn't it? 

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