I don’t have enough vitriol in me tonight for the pit so let me just say how tremendously disappointed I am with Prime Day on Amazon.
Then I heard about how today was going to be the most super awesome day ever with more deals than black Friday.
This shouldn’t be necessary for this audience, but here ya go with the link:
I expected a lot of the deals, like black Friday sales, to be irrelevant to me, but still, what a letdown! I needed 10 different things from the site, including pretty popular software, shoes, household stuff, and dog bones. I waited until today hoping there would be a sale on that or something, anything, I gave a shit about. Nothing. Instead, my eyes were assaulted by leftover exercise equipment, cat harnesses, and 4 different variations on garcinia camboja. So much crap, very little of value to me.
On top of that, they don’t just have sales. They have “lightning deals.” Shoppers are supposed to check back every 20 minutes and dig through a new list of treasures. Ain’t nobody got time for that!
I pay $80 a year for 2 day shipping and other perks, and I’m not complaining about that. Worth it! Love me some perks. Not saying prime isn’t a good deal for me, or I expected all my special stuff to be on sale, but I’m just not impressed with 60% off chia seeds that are probably not moving off the shelves fast enough.
Yes! I grabbed a DeWalt DCD785C2 20V driver/hammer drill plus a large accessory pack for $167. The drill alone goes for $199, and the 80 piece accessory pack is another $40.
Prime Day is full of fail, but the tweets about it are hysterical. And you pay $100 a year now, not $80 - they hiked the price for the first time last year but it is still worth it, yes.
I picked up the Kingsman Blu-ray for ten bucks, which was a heck of a deal on something I was going to get anyway… but yeah, most of it looked like “this is crap we were just going to toss out anyway, might as well make a profit on it”.
Because they want you to add the item to your cart and check out, and evidence indicates both that people are unlikely to back out after completely the checkout process and that the ability to have an item quickly strongly affects the likelihood a person will purchase a product. Next day shipping is expensive because that’s what the market will bear, mainly because next day shipping is used by businesses and rich people, neither of whom are price sensitive.
are you sure it said “free?”
I see all the time where they say “get it tomorrow” but it’s never free. Today I paid $7.95 for next day shipping because I honestly can’t wait until Friday to get one of my items.
Yeah, when Amazon bought Woot, people were worried that Woot would be come lame (and this prediction has largely come true). But what they didn’t expect is that Amazon would then become the newly lame Woot and try flogging any old crap that they had lying around the warehouse floor at discounts that could best be described as underwhelming.
I got the impression that even the Kindle models that they were discounting were last year’s news.
Heh, yeah. I took a look and it was like, iPhone case, necklace, CD, lady’s panties, toys, oven mitt, kitchen storage bowls, lady’s panties, iPhone case. Wut?
[Woot.com is a website which sells one item a day and is somewhat irreverent in describing the items.]
Every now and then, Woot will offer a “Bag-of-Crap” for $5, which can be anything. People have gotten TV’s, mattresses, refrigerators, etc. But quite often, it really is a bag of crap of whatever they have lying around. Coozies, pins, cases for weird phones, etc. I’ve done it a few times and thrown pretty much everything away. It sounds like this prime day sale was like they were selling what they normally would put in the BoCs.
Well, I got a $160 pair of shoes (Ecco Fusion bicycle-toe) for $121, including tax, so Prime Day worked out well for me.
But yeah, a lot of the deals were lame, and the mechanism for finding them was atrocious. I bet they lost more sales because of people being unable to actually easily browse the sale items than they did because the deals were lame.
They ought to have had a “Prime Day” search filter that you could click while doing your normal searching, not that weird and stupid side-scrolling shit.
I get quite a few items with free same day shipping if I order before noon. Someone rolls up in front of my house driving their personal vehicle and hands me the package - FedEx or UPS or USPS never touches it.
But yeah, prime day failed hard. I had a list of wants and none of them were on sale. Just hard to navigate leftover junk.
Yeah, I gave up trying to hunt through their terrible webpage after the first round of lightning “deals”. It seemed like they some really good deals for a handful of fairly expensive items. I noticed they had some best-discount-ever deals on a few Roomba models, which I’ve been thinking about recently. Also some really good deals on a few power tools. But that’s not the sort of purchase that I’m willing to make during a 3-hour sale…
Hell, I really could have used some basic shit like socks, jeans, or a handful of basic kitchen items. I looked a few times, but they didn’t have anything I wanted. $25 Lee jeans, only one color available in my very common size? I can find more at just about any local department store.
Seemed to me that Amazon roped the people in with a few good deals on Amazon-branded stuff, and a few DVDs. Then the rest of the stuff seemed like they had all of their third-party sellers agree to put one item on sale from their store, at least 20% off. And since all those little sellers are just little sellers and don’t have millions of dollars to spare, they just picked some weird shit to appease Amazon’s demands and that was your “lightning sales” junk.
What Amazon should have done was issue coupons or something. Or have flash sales like “30% off everything in Outdoor Tools for 1 hour” and then Amazon pays the third-party sellers the discount.
I had a list of wants and none of them were on sale. Just hard to navigate leftover junk.