This was the biggest thing for me. Amazon’s site is great for finding specific items, but it’s terrible for browsing, and in a sale like that what I really wanted to do was browse the deals. It was somehow even worse on mobile. I did end up grabbing a couple of the headliners, but there was no easy way to look through all of the deals and have the interesting stuff catch my eye.
Yuk. I’m a new grandmother and hoped to find some baby/child goodies on sale. They had them listed, but as always seems to be the case with anything craveable on Amazon, although I hovered over the sale and pressed the buy button immediately, in each and every case the item was already sold out and waitlist was full. Being more stubborn than sensible, I tried numerous times throughout the day on several different devices and with at least a couple different networks, with the same results. I’m done with their stupid Lightning Deals. I have never scored one yet.
What drives me nuts in general about Amazon’s searching is that their filtering sucks. I suppose it could be data, and not the mechanism, but whatever the reason, I hate searching for something like “AA batteries 48 pack” and clicking the “Prime” filter button, and then seeing at the top of my search results, a 24 pack of AAA batteries that aren’t even Prime items, or worse, something like D batteries.
That, and the idiotic requirement that I choose a category before it’ll let me sort by price.
Yeah those categories suck, I’m giving specific search terms (sometimes even a model number) so I shouldn’t need to pick from your arbitrary (and often wrong) categories.
And also when searching by model number I keep catching the search giving me similar items with different model numbers. Very dangerous and no doubt responsible for many returns of incorrect items.
The only thing I got was a Fire TV Stick, and thankfully my SO got it early, because they were sold out by midday. Other than that the sale sucked donkey butt.
I was checking on my tablet, and all I could see were 30 lightning deals that didn’t seem to change much at all: those aero gardens (four different styles) a couple grills, a set of six sheets of some sort of colored plastic (that one stayed on there a looooong time), a star-shaped dog toy, a Kindle, a DVD and some other odds and ends of things I’d never heard of. So I checked my wishlist…nothing in there was at any great sale price. My cart? Nothing had gone on sale…ok, one item was 15 cents cheaper…I searched for a few items…nothing. I figured I was just totally incompetent at Amazon and that the great deals and exciting stuff must be tucked away somewhere only the cool kids know about. Glad to know it wasn’t totally me. But since they did this Prime Day two days before payday, there wasn’t much danger of me buying anything anyways.
Well, it could be said they were more successful in one shot than the mopes at AdBusters have been with Buy Nothing Day, in about 25 times as many attempts.
I predict that in just a few years it will be a fixture of the retail-squee landscape, up there with Black Friday through Tepid Thursday and the millions who watch the Super Bowl for the ads.
It worked great for me, but there is no question that it also was a big let-down.
On Tuesday I got an email from ROKU that as of the previous day, HBO-GO will no longer stream on my older model. They’ll sell me a new one at some discount. This email made sure that whatever I bought to replace it, it wasn’t ROKU, so the Fire-TV stick deal on Amazon prime day the very next morning was a great fit.
Also finally got a Kindle, it was one of the things on my “if it ever gets cheap enough” list.
Supremely unimpressed by cheap shitty watches, phone cases, chew toys etc. and bummed out I wasn’t fast enough for the sunscreen deal.
When all of the advertising promised “More deals than Black Friday” all I focused on was the “more” part. Like, noticing it did not say “bigger” or “better” just “more.”
And looking over it briefly in the morning, I noticed that was about right.
Am I missing something? So far I’ve seen only one thing I wanted to buy. That’s a Fire Stick for my bedroom TV that’s $24.99, regularly $39.99, but I can’t get the sale price to go in my cart. (I can put the $39.99 in there instantly, but it’s said “Loading” on the sale price for an hour.)
Big heaping Costco sized helping of “Meh”.
My daughter’s birthday is coming up in a few weeks. I bought her a 7" Kindle Fire tablet for $33 (also so she doesn’t keep monopolizing my Nexus tablet) and it turns out a pair of shoes that I had my eye on for her are 30% off today.
I had been thinking about buying an Amazon Echo ($130 today) but I am going to wait for Google’s version coming out this fall.
But yeah, there are a lot of mediocre deals, plus it’s hard sifting through them all.