I'm a little confused because while it feels like the overall reaction towards the first ever Amazon Prime Day was disappointment and anger, new stats shared by the online retail giant suggest the exact opposite.
In a press release shared today, Amazon claimed record-breaking sales. In fact, Amazon claims to have sold more units on Prime Day than the biggest Black Friday ever and had more new members try Prime worldwide than any single day in Amazon history.
In total, 34.4 million items were sold across Prime-eligible countries, breaking all Black Friday records with 398 items sold per second. Additionally, customers ordered "hundreds of thousands of Amazon devices" — making it the largest device sales day ever worldwide.
So what did people buy? Amazon shared some Prime Day highlights specifically from the U.S.:
- Members ordered tens of thousands of Fire TV Sticks in one hour, making it the fastest-selling deal on an Amazon device ever
- Fire tablet sales on Amazon exceeded sales on Black Friday last year
- Members ordered thousands of e-readers and thousands of Echos in just 15 minutes
- 56,000 Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy sets
- 47,000 Televisions sold, which was 1300% year-over-year growth
- 51,000 Bose Headphones, compared to 8 the previous Wednesday
- 8,000 Rubbermaid 42-Piece Easy Find Lid Food Storage Sets, compared to 428 the previous Wednesday
- 24,000 Instant Pot 7-in-1 Programmable Pressure Cookers, compared to 182 the previous Wednesday
- 14,000 iRobot Roomba 595 Pet Vacuum Cleaning Robots, compared to 1 the previous Wednesday
- 12,000 Fifty Shades of Grey Unrated Edition on Blu-ray, compared to 121 the previous Wednesday
- 10,000 Meguiar's X2020 Supreme Shine Microfiber Towels, compared to 244 the previous Wednesday
Globally, here's what the top sellers around the world, excluding Amazon devices were:
- US: Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy
- UK: Lenovo FLEX 10 10.1-inch Multimode Touchscreen Notebook
- Spain: SSD Drive
- Japan: Green Smoothie mix
- Italy: Logitech Keyboard
- Germany: Croc Sandals
- France: Monopoly Boardgame
- Canada: Huggies Diapers
- Austria: Croc Sandals
Amazon even included some positive feedback from sellers, which enjoyed "the biggest day ever" with record-breaking unit sales growing nearly 300 percent worldwide.
Adding to the press release, Amazon Prime Vice President Greg Greeley confirmed Amazon Prime Day will return. "After yesterday's results, we'll definitely be doing this again," he said.
Unfortunately, what Amazon seems to have ignored in the press release is the anger and frustrated by millions of actual Prime members who missed out on some of the day's better deals due to "claim" limit being reached so quickly. While the numbers above are pretty impressive, most of the day was littered with garbage sales so pathetic many referred to Amazon Prime Day as a garage sale for the online retailer. In fact, the overall sentiment towards Prime Day was so negative that it actually sparked a separate hashtag on Twitter #PrimeDayFail, which is actually pretty amusing.
