Prime Day: Aftermath

Well, Prime Day was an absolute disaster... Well, unless you get the major deals like the 4k television. And Amazon used it to sell their relatively unknown Echo; and it seemed to have marketed the product back into the mainstream news outlets.

But for most consumers, it seemed like they were extremely disappointed in the deals; particularly most were old/useless products and/or sold out immediately due to limited quantities. But somehow Amazon still had more sales on Prime Day than on Black Friday. So for Amazon, it probably wasn't too much of a disaster... But it may have come with negative publicity and a hit to Amazon's seemingly pristine reputation.

For me, I felt like the experience of hunting for deals on Prime Day was chaotic (on mobile and desktop). You could see  5-7 deals at one time with the need to click on arrows to see others. The deals didn't update properly under the correct available/upcoming/missed deal categories as one would expect. You could sort by high level categories (e.g. Electronics, Toys & Games), but there is no option of seeing more than 5-7 sale items at one time; I would have expected an option to see many more on one page.

And for Walmart's experience on Prime Day? Well, I wasn't confident I even found the competing "Prime Day" deals... They had tons of the rollbacks (advertised on the site) but I didn't know if those were the one day deals. Walmart's online experience is absolutely terrible to navigate. They do use similar arrow scrolling panels to feature products as Amazon but they only show 5 products and include an excessive amount of white space. While you can view many more deals on one page (once you get there), there is a ton of wasted space and completely irrelevant information. Under all products $35, it states "Free Shipping on orders over $35" and under products over $35, it states "Free Shipping". I found this to be irritating. The default area given to a product thumbnail should probably be taken down a bit.

One of the better features of Walmart's online experience which I don't understand more companies with brick and mortar stores do, is filtering by the availability of products at user-selected stores.

Overall, both online stores can vastly improve their site for consumer experience. Walmart definitely has much more work to compete with Amazon in ecommerce in terms of usability and marketing, but has the advantages of the convenience of the brick and mortar stores all over.