Hype is a double edged sword, and just like others before (and probably many more in the future) Amazon found out the hard way. After an unprecedented amount of hype (especially by Amazon’s fairly low key standards), Prime Day arrived, and it did not live to that level of hype. With that hype level, probably anything short of $100 iPads under every chair (stand-in for very popular fast-selling item offered at a crazy discount), would have generated varying levels of disappointment.
The internet had its fun with #PrimeDayFail quips (see some of them assembled at Heavy and Gizmodo among many others).
More after the jump since this is a “meta” post. It is a long boring post, it can help you fall asleep and you don’t need a prescription for it 🙂
Instead Prime turned out to be more of a utilitarian sale, somewhat of the niche variety. For example, one of the best deals was restricted into a niche: if you had the Amazon Chase Visa credit card, you could get $20 off $100+. Whether you bought short term consumables and household items (random things, memory cards, toilet paper, ladybugs, etc) or made a “real” purchase (eg basic prime lens), if you strategically made a $100-ish purchase, it would turn out into a 20%-ish discount. Accessible all day, no waiting-lists and 15-minute countdown clocks pressuring you to decide. But it was definitely not a sexy headline-grabbing deal.
Another one of the best deals was a $40 credit on a 1-year Creative Cloud for Photographers subscription. So commit to pay $120 at $10 month, and get $40 to spend on future purchases. Effectively a 33% discount for frequent or willing shoppers. Not bad, but again, not something sexy for the general population.
You see the theme here? That’s what I saw – while I haven’t checked every lightning deal that went live, I saw most of them. Not for lack of trying – in a 30 hour “Situation Room” period (minus six hours of sleep and one hour walk to reboot the brain with semi-polluted fresh oxygen), I was deep into the Lightning Deals – and still couldn’t catch up with all. Of all those, the theme of niche and practical/utilitarian emerged, with occasional eye-candy that flew fast into the Waitlist and even worse, the waiting for a Waitlist spot to open, so you earn the right to wait some more.
Camera Wise
Camera-wise, there was the Sony a3000 with 18-55 closeout at $200, along with decent prices on a Nikon P-series Superzoom and P&S (especially if combined with the Chase Visa discount), and a parade of Rokinon lenses that were however mostly for the Canon mount. But there wasn’t the sexy doorbuster. If people were hoping to get discounts on the hot cameras du jour or popular long shelf life gear, that did not happen, with the exception being the Sigma 70-200 f2.8 OS FLD XYZ BDR WER QWE (okay some of the TLAs are made-up) but even that, it only for the Canon mount.
On the fun side of things, there was the Mystery Camera surprise. I don’t recall Amazon doing something like that before. Mystery boxes and grab bags are not uncommon among bargain and deal of the day websites, but typically it’s a t-shirt grab bag or a triple-refurbished 8086 laptop with 64K RAM, not a $420 brand new camera. From what I’ve seen, this looks like it is the Canon SL1 kit, so at a discount to regular prices, but not definitely not the jaw-dropping Black Friday hysteria discount.
Unheralded
Lost probably in the madness was the 15% off blanket discount at Amazon Warehouse Deals, where one can occasionally find some really good deals, but doing so typically requires spending time checking and price-checking and getting lost in the digital bushes.
Amazon’s own products had most of the all-day deals, partially perhaps because Amazon is the seller so they can self-negotiate quantities, partially perhaps because they wanted to promote them. One could get a basic Kindle e-reader or a basic Fire tablet or a FireTV stick or an Echo at a decent discount, but again, not a sexy screaming on Facebook/Twitter “OMG, I scored an iPad for $99” type of a deal.
The Black Friday comparison
The Black Friday comparison is another double edged sword. Once upon a time, Black Friday really had once-a-year type of deals. Not anymore. It’s not even the best day to shop in November, let alone the whole year. So while the accountants and marketing may say “better than Black Friday” and technically be right, the consumer reads that to mean really really good deals, not just decent practical discounts. Expectations not met. Perhaps there’s good reason Amazon doesn’t do hype often, they are not as good at it, it’s not in their DNA 🙂
The size and popularity of Amazon is another double-edged factor. If they offered the mythical “iPads for $100”, only a very very tiny percentage of people wanting to buy them would be able to get them, and the disappointment would be even bigger than not finding anything sexy to buy. Considering that even some of the mildly interesting items that got offered yesterday got to WaitList status fairly quickly – with a smaller percentage of shoppers interested in them.
It’s Coming Back?
According to Amazon (see Forbes and Marketing Land etc), Prime Day is coming back next year. Whether it’s corporate pride or they really mean it, only time will tell 🙂
Perhaps they should consider marketing it differently, like “don’t stock up on nutrition bars until after Prime Day, especially if you like chia raspberry blueberry fiber bars” 😉
If nothing else, it’s an early warm-up for the real Black Friday. Don’t look now but Black Friday is just 4 months and a few days away!
Comment capability is back — terrific.
You’ve written a good, thoughtful post-mortem post on Amazon’s big event. As you might expect, I’ve done some thinking about this and come up with a couple of ideas about how the company could do it better.
Next time around, in cameras and perhaps in other suitable product categories, Amazon would do well to acquire a vast quantity of one or two of a certain high-appeal, longish-of-tooth type item, and offer it at a killer price. Even so-called refurbs of a good model would suffice. Or, with its massive buying power, Amazon could make a deal with a camera maker to buy an end-of-cycle, special production run of a popular model just for Amazon.
For example, the Olympus XZ-2, which Oly has been selling on its Web site as a refurb for $239 throughout 2015, and if I recall correctly, for at least two or three months last year. It’s a great camera. Great as a second or third camera. Great as a travel camera, or walk-around camera. High quality hardware and image quality. Oly never figured out how to market it, a chronic problem with the company. Amazon could arrange to buy a trainload of them and sell them at its big Prime Black Friday in July (ahem) extravaganza for, say, $219. That would blow some minds, and make a whole lot of wallets open. And, it would be a boon to the nearly anonymous-to-the-mass-market Olympus.
Another possibility, perhaps for another year’s event, would be for Amazon to contract with Sigma or another independent lens maker to produce a very-good or excellent-quality, high-appeal lens for the top-three APS-C DSLR brands or micro four thirds brands. How about an Amazon Basics dual-focal-length lens, f/2.8 or f/3.5, 24mm and 48mm equivalent, for, say, $199? There you have two extremely useful, desirable focal lengths in one lens that’s lighter and less costly to design and manufacture than a full zoom. I think Amazon could sell thousands, maybe tens of thousands of them and sock away $50 in profit, or close thereabouts, on each one.
I think Amazon could use a similar strategy in some other product lines as well. That would spice things up, and it would probably prompt people to come back to future such events, and get others who didn’t bother with this one to show up and look around next time.
Some good ideas if they are listening! If not, maybe some of the smaller more dedicated online dealers could do this. Amazon is expanding in so many directions, I don’t know if they can focus enough on anything these days.