Prime Day glitch just a hiccup for Amazon

Event has raked in $3.5 billion and counting.

SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon may have gone down for the first hour of its Prime Day sale, but that didn’t stop the money-making machine. It ended up as the company’s biggest sales event ever, reeling in an estimated $3.5 billion.

According to Feedvisor, an online price-tracking company, Amazon’s sales rose 59 percent during the 36-hour deal promotion compared with the same period the week before.

A second e-commerce firm, Zentail, estimates Amazon sold $3.57 billion in goods.. Last year, Amazon Prime Day brought in sales of around $2.4 billion, Coresight Research estimates, though the sale lasted only 30 hours, not 36.

Amazon didn’t release sales figures for the event, but it did say that this year’s Prime Day sales surpassed those on last year’s Cyber Monday and Black Friday and Prime Day.

That’s all despite the site and app going down in the first hour. Amazon has not said what the problem was, but the outage shows that online shopping is not yet an infallible replacement for brick and mortar.

Prime Day launched at noon Seattle time on Monday, and immediately there were problems that kept users from using three Amazon channels – the Amazon.com website, the mobile shopping app and the digital voice assistant.

The glitch was embarrassing but wasn’t likely to put much of a dent in Amazon’s sales for the event, analysts said. Amazon shares hit a record high Tuesday, and Jeff Bezos cemented his position as the richest man in modern history, assuming bragging rights once held by Bill Gates. It was close to flat Wednesday.

The problems of the world’s second largest e-commerce provider during its much-hyped sale are a reminder that despite more than 20 years of growth in online sales, the shift to the Internet is not trouble-free.

It’s not uncommon for retail sites to go down in times of high traffic. Certainly, many companies experienced trouble during Black Friday and Cyber Monday in last year’s holiday shopping season. And last week, YouTube went down in the middle of the World Cup soccer semifinal match between England and Croatia.

In a statement, Amazon said that it realized there had been issues. “It wasn’t all a walk in the (dog) park, we had a ruff start,” the statement said, alluding to the photos of cute but contrite dogs that appeared on its mobile app saying there was a problem.