The following post is by Summer Intern: David Bloch, dbloch@localhost
Last week, Amazon debuted its much-hyped Prime Day sale to commemorate the company’s 20th anniversary. But while the e-commerce behemoth gained acclaim in the build-up, its celebration was short-lived once the sale took place.
Amazon touted the June 15th event as a grander Black Friday. However, by and large, disappointed customers couldn’t find anything they wanted to buy. The public immediately criticized the online retailer for its oversaturation of arbitrary items—which many described as a mass garage sale—and sell-outs of sought-after offers.
Rival companies also jumped on the opportunity to decry Prime Day. In a blog, Fernando Madeira, President and CEO of Walmart.com, stated “we’ve heard some retailers are charging $100 to get access to a sale but the idea of asking customers to pay extra in order to save money just doesn’t add up for us.” TIME even came out with an article, titled “Everybody Hates Amazon’s Prime Day Deals.”
Amazon attempted to handle the adversity by refusing to acknowledge Prime Day’s failure. In a recent press release, the company boasted “Amazon sold more units on Prime Day than Black Friday 2014…Customers ordered hundreds of thousands of Amazon devices – making it the largest device sales day ever worldwide.”
However, numbers aren’t always the best determinants of a situation. Customers are irritated with Amazon, and simply spewing facts and figures isn’t going to hide that.
According to Todd Grossman, CEO of the Americas for Talkwalker, “Amazon needs to think about how they can turn customer sentiment around to avoid a longer-term reputation issue,” but this does not entail sweeping the problem under a rug.