What the Tech? Amazon Prime Day Problems
Many Amazon customers had trouble placing orders and shopping on day one of Amazon Prime Day.
Here’s what’s happening: A customer goes to make a purchase and instead of getting a verification that the order was placed, they see this: a photo of a dog.
The reason? Too many people shopping at the same time. Even Amazon and its servers can’t keep up. A check on down-detector show Amazon having outage problems throughout the United States.
Last year, Amazon sold 100 million products and this year it’s expected to be even more and there are more Prime members today than there were last year.
As for the dogs, they’re not just some stock photos, they’re pets of Amazon employees who bring their dogs to work. At Amazon headquarters, more than 7,000 dogs are registered to come to work. That’s around 1 dog for every 7 employees at the Seattle headquarters.
Amazon ran into the same problem with Prime Day 2018. Many customers reported they missed out on lightning deals because by the time they could place their order, the sale had ended or the items sold out.
The good news is, most customers can refresh the page to place their order.
Are deals as good this year as last? Even better, particularly on Amazon products such as the Echo dot, Fire TVs and Fire Tablets.
If you are shopping during the 48 hour “Prime Day”, it’s best to do so on your home wi-fi connection. If you’re out and on your phone, don’t shop when you’re on a public wifi connection. Turn off wifi and shop using your cellular data plan and use a virtual private network, or VPN to better protect yourself and your accounts.
Other online retailers are having big sales to compete. If you’re shopping on multiple sites, it’s a good idea to change your passwords so you’re not using the same one on all of those sites. It’s a good idea to change your passwords when all these sales end on Wednesday.
If you are buying things on Prime Day, choose your delivery date so someone’s home, or have the items delivered to a pickup point near you. You’ll find that option when you’re checking out at Amazon.
