Amazon Prime Day is over, and what a ride it was this year. Widespread technical glitches in the first hours of Amazon’s massive annual Prime Day promotion cost the e-commerce giant an estimated $1.2 million a minute, according to One Click Retail founder Spencer Millerberg.
Amazon failed to secure enough servers to handle the traffic surge on Prime Day, causing it to launch a scaled-down backup front page and temporarily kill off all international traffic, according to internal Amazon documents obtained by CNBC.
According to Adobe Analytics data released this morning, larger retailers – meaning those with over a billion in annual revenue – saw a 54 percent increase in sales on Prime Day, compared with an average Tuesday. This is attributed to increased conversions on their own sites, Adobe says.
Amazon sold more than one million smart home devices on July 17, the second day of its 36-hour Prime Day event, making it the biggest sales day for smart home devices in the e-commerce giant’s history, according to an Amazon press release.
Target’s summer sales event, which coincided with Amazon’s Prime Day, was the highest single day of online traffic and sales of the year, the company said Wednesday.
