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Amazon Suffers Glitches at the Start of Prime Day (techcrunch.com) 120
- is it good or is it whack?
- by Anonymous Coward
Yeah. For those of us who actually shop, Prime isn’t that good of a deal on most things – especially when you have to pony up $119 for the “privilege” of giving your money to Amazon.
So I can buy Hodgson Oat Bran on Amazon for $9.97 [amazon.com] or a Pack of 2 for $19.99 [amazon.com] or I can buy it from Kroger for $2.19 [kroger.com].
Sure, I can buy a pack of 12 for $28.20 ($2.35/box) [amazon.com] but I’m still shelling out money and storing things that I have no room for. So, it’s a false economy.
- Here it is on Amazon (sold by Hodgson, not a third party) for $2.03: https://www.amazon.com/Hodgson… [amazon.com] Guess you are wrong.
- That’ll work great if you have Amazon Fresh in your area.
Re:Prime is not worth it. (Score:5, Informative)
by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Monday July 16, 2018 @04:13PM (#56958964) Homepage JournalYeah. For those of us who actually shop, Prime isn’t that good of a deal on most things – especially when you have to pony up $119 for the “privilege” of giving your money to Amazon.
Depends on what you use Prime for…..
I find it a value still (but maybe not if it goes over $119/yr)…..but I use it for:
1. “Free” 2 day shipping on most things
2. Prime Video – I watch a lot of movies/TV shows from Prime offerings included with PRIME.
3. eBooks – I like to use the PRIME ebook offerings, I look over magazines, books, etc….
4. Prime Music- I enjoy a lot of music streaming from Prime Music, I hook my phone into my car system and stream music commercial free to listen to while driving all the time.
5. Storage – Now, I don’t at this time use this, but I believe it comes with a decent bit of “free” storage on Amazon cloud for photos, etc…
I believe there are other services that come with Prime too, but I find all of these to be useful and I used them and they are valuable for my annual fee for Amazon Prime.
I believe they are also offering some benefits/sales at Whole Foods for Prime members too?
If Amazon continues to pursue the medical/prescription drug aspirations, it may channel into that too.
As far as prices….I do look at Amazon’s pricing on something I want, and still to date, Amazon’s 3rd party sellers don’t charge sales tax, so that’s something to look into too. Shopping Amazon as with any other retailer, requires the customer to do a bit of homework themselves, and to weigh convenience vs pricing.
- “Amazon’s 3rd party sellers don’t charge sales tax”
This is becoming false.
100% of our sales on Amazon to PA customers are charged sales tax by Amazon.Also I’m glad you put “Free” in quotes for the free 2 day shipping. All sellers on Amazon utilizing Fulfillment by Amazon pay Amazon for every shipment. If you have ever wondered how 119 a year is enough for Amazon to cover the bill to a shipping carrier for a member who purchases a few times a week – it isn’t.
They are charging you annually for two
- * are charged sales tax, at checkout (so to the customer), by Amazon. So while we aren’t doing it directly, it is false to imply that a buyer purchasing from a 3rd party merchant will not have to pay sales tax.
- I still don’t get charged sales tax on any of the 3rd party sales from amazon to my state….
- Unless your state is Ohio, then they charge it on April 15.
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 @03:34PM (#56958700)Turns out they accidentally listed a number of items that was not divisible by only itself or one.
- by lgw ( 121541 )
Looks more like they divided by zero.
- I think Top Gear stole most of those sayings to use as introductions for The Stig
Only Chuck Norris has the top gear
- would that be not prime day?
It also seems to have eaten all of my wish lists today
Hmm, maybe today is actually Singularity day.
- 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 @03:39PM (#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]
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.
“Prime Day” is played out.
“Megatron Day” or gtfo.
- 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.
- the story was about prime day not prime video…
- The story is about Prime-related links that are causing Amazon customers trouble.
Someone had a massive, globally distributed, computing platform that people could rent for a short time as and when needed……….
It looks like Amazon will be beefing up infrastructure before the holidays.
- 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].
Hey, I’m way more of a nobody than Kylie Jenner! How about making me a billionaire?
- I’m pretty sure this story is about Amazons infrastructure not being able to handle the load, which is of technical interest. But nice rant.
- wasn’t even a good rant…
- I rated it a 3 out of 5 stars on Amazon.
Re:Shop local. Use cash. Fuckers. (Score:4, Funny)
by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday July 16, 2018 @03:59PM (#56958870)I thought it was a pretty good rant, 4/5 stars. But I did receive it for free in exchange for this review.- unfortunately we’ve removed your rating as it violates our policy. his rant was not against amazon per se but the state of our education system. but I diverge.
- Same. Would’ve given four, but it doesn’t say “verified purchase.”
- Mod parent up — buying from Amazon is a vote for the destruction of local business and privacy (considering their entry into the mass surveillance market).
do that in NYC and you only support higher rents
- Lower rents — if landlords can’t rent ground-floor commercial space, guess how they make up the difference…
Re:Shop local. Use cash. Fuckers. (Score:5, Insightful)
by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Monday July 16, 2018 @04:53PM (#56959280)Funny, that’s exactly how I feel about Walmart and Target. I try to shop mom n’ pop where / when possible.
For me Amazon isn’t about shopping from home, it’s about stock availability.
I used to buy my music at Spec’s, until Spec’s died.
I used to buy my books at All Books and Records, until they died.
I used to buy used vinyl and CDs at the same place, and a feew others, until they died.I used to buy my clothes at Pennys and Sears, until they too became a shadow of what they were, with no inventory.
So where, exactly, local, should I buy? I buy from whomever has stock, thank you very much. “Oh, I can order it for you?” Yeah. So can I.
I don’t blame Amazon, I blame Walmart. Amazon’s just sweeping away the ashes of what Walmart torched 20 years ago.
- I am not too bright, but it sounds like you are getting 130ukp off. How is that a con? That is a pretty big discount over other sellers.
- 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.
- by dknj ( 441802 ) on Monday July 16, 2018 @04:01PM (#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
- You know it. I just visited Amazon. Seems to work fine. Just got some great deals! 30% off an Echo! Thanks Amazon!
- You’re paying to bug your own house? Scamazon should be thanking YOU.
- You don’t understand. I saved 30%.
- That’s still 100% too much. Or more than 100%, since Scamazon should be paying YOU
- Did I mention I got free shipping too?
- Free “sheeping?”
- It wasn’t free. It is 30% off!
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.
- 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 sawIf 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.
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.
- and there are some items where even with 4-5 Brick and mortar stores don’t have something in stock /
Re:Fuck you, Amazombies. (Score:5, Insightful)
by reboot246 ( 623534 ) on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:44PM (#56959576) HomepageYes, and if the brick and mortar store doesn’t stock the item, they’ll say they can order it for you. Hell, I can order the damned thing myself!Some things I buy from Amazon *are* available locally, IF I want to drive 8 or 10 miles to Walmart or Target, hunt for a parking space, and stand in line to give them my money. Call me lazy or impatient, but unless I’m going to be passing by the store on my way to work and back anyway, it’s not worth the effort to drive there from home.
- Because eventually people will figure out that he is off his rocker and the stock price will fall 100%.
Imagine the result if musk resigned. Stock would drop by 70%.
Well, depending on how risk adverse you are…I would consider that to possibly be a buying opportunity.
- How is a stock with a P/E ratio of negative 28 worth $90?
How is a stock with a P/E ratio of negative 28 worth $90?
Wow.
It’s like I’m reading Slashdot, circa early 2001.
If only there were some historical event that could possibly give us some insight as to what could happen if we keep up this financial stupidity…
- Probably be the same as when Eich “resigned.”
Kicking out Musk would probably be a good thing for Tesla, as they could actually get someone in there with car manufacturing experience to properly ramp up manufacturing instead of trying to build cars out of a tent. I can only imagine the quality issues those cars are going to have off the lot.
I think the strain was just too much, with people always on his nuts, they were beginning to tear. I mean, it’s gotten to the point where people are so Elon obsessed, they interject him into everything with a negative light, even though he has nothing to do with the actual topic.
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