Digital Savant: Why Prime Day wasn’t really a bust for Amazon
Meanwhile, gamers mourn Nintendo’s beloved Satoru Iwata.
Well, that was certainly a thing that Amazon did.
Last week, on July 15, Amazon.com declared for its 20th anniversary “Prime Day,” a completely self-made holiday of deals it likened beforehand to Black Friday, but better.
Never mind that in recent years, Black Friday as a shopping bonanza has come to be known as a sinkhole many avoid because the limited number of items available at a deep discount just aren’t worth the hassle.
If you only followed Prime Day on social media, you might think Amazon’s effort was a complete disaster. Snarky Tweeters derided the mishmash of Lightning Deal products as mustavoids while tech and shopping blogs gleefully listed the worst items for sale. Some customers complained that they couldn’t complete their purchases on Amazon’s site while others said that the items they sought sold out too quickly, such as 4K television sets and Amazon’s own voice-activated Echo speaker, which was discounted to $129.
Given the reaction, you might think Amazon’s reputation took a ding and that the disappointment might cause some long-term brand damage. But in the short term, at least for Amazon, Prime Day appears to have been an enormous win. It moved items that would have otherwise sat in warehouses, spurred some to subscribe to the company’s $99-a-year Prime service and attracted to Amazon’s site many more customers than usual, even if many chose to take a pass on the merchandise.
The company’s insistence on comparing Prime Day with Black Friday may have been misguided — one online retailer’s sales versus sales from all major online and brickand-mortar stores seems like a weird comparison — but in comparison with itself, Amazon says it broke records. The company said in a news release that it sold 18 percent more on Prime Day than on 2014’s Black Friday, at a rate of 398 items per second.
“After yesterday’s results, we’ll definitely be doing this again,” said Greg Greeley, vice president of Amazon Prime, who apparently didn’t get the memo from Twitter that Prime Day was a big bust.
The company sold 56,000 sets of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, 14,000 iRobot Roomba pet vacuum robots and 47,000 television sets, many of them 4K sets costing between $800$1,000, among many sale items.
Those don’t seem like failure numbers. Amazon is, as the old saying goes, laughing all the way to the bank. For my own part, I spent $140 ($129 + tax) on Amazon’s Echo speaker, an item I hadmy eye on and only needed a price drop to justify. I passed over every other deal, but with one purchase, I was part of the wave of people feeding into Amazon’s
frenzy.
Amazon’s gambit, of course, was not just to move chef’s hats and “50 Shades of Grey” DVDs, but to get people on board its Prime service, which boosts its streaming TV customer numbers for shows like “Transparent” and expands ears for its Prime Music service. Being a Prime customers makes it more likely they’ll buy into Amazon’s line of e-readers, tablets and TV devices and download the company’s apps.
What’s most surprising about Prime Day is that after 20 years, people still underestimate Amazon’s power in the marketplace. Prime Day causedWalMart to play along with an all-day sale, kept deal sites hopping all week and became a media-blitz of an event in the middle of prime — so to speak — nonshopping season.
Amazon can take all the jokes and then some. They’re walking away with truckloads of money and new Prime members, so why not laugh along?
Saying goodbye to Satoru Iwata
From schadenfreude to genuine sadness, the video game world spent much of last week mourning the loss of Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata.
If you’ve never heard of him, that’s OK. Most video game executives blend into the background, allowing the spectacle of cutting-edge graphics and celebrity voice artists to overshadow them. Iwata was no attention hog, but among fans of Nintendo, industry press and developers, he was beloved and very visible.
Despite his ever-present business suit, Iwata’s irrepressible personality was always on display in Nintendo’s “Direct” videos, where he previewed upcoming games and, in “Iwata Asks” interviews, asked Nintendo developers questions in a generous, freewheeling panel format. During the 13 years since he became Nintendo’s president, gamers got to know Iwata’s playful sense of humor, his enthusiasm for fun over coolness and his willingness to be above all silly and human.
It seems deeply unfair that Iwata died at 55 of bile duct cancer. Nintendo has been on the ropes of late with its struggling Wii U game console and a rough transition period bringing its games to non-Nintendo mobile devices. If Nintendo rebounds, as it tends to do after its roughest periods, Iwata won’t get to see the fruits of his most recent work. He did get to be a part of the staggering success of the Nintendo Wii and the dual-screen Nintendo DS, which continues to be a cash cow in its ongoing iterations. The Wii and the DS are two of the bestselling game consoles of all time.
Iwata started, though, as a game developer, bringing the world the puffball character Kirby and classics such as “EarthBound” and “Balloon Fight.” Recently in these pages, I praised the NintendoWii U game “Splatoon,” one of the freshest, fun and distinctly well-crafted games of the year. It’s a new game that feels like it has Iwata’s fingerprints all over it.
Gamers are rarely somber, often moving on to the next thing in short order. But Nintendo is not like other game companies, and Iwata was not the typical game executive.
Even the most cynical gamers have a soft spot for Nintendo’s greatest hits and the big risks the company has taken to stand out from the crowd. No matter what mistakes Nintendo made, Iwata’s love of games and the gamers who played them was never in doubt. His loss will be felt for a very long time.