Amazon Prime Day Gets Off to Rocky Start With Site Glitches

Amazon.com suffered glitches at the start of Prime Day on Monday, slowing sales on the e-tailer's biggest shopping day of the year. Amazon's annual shopping holiday kicked off at 3 pm E.T. and runs for 36 hours, the longest Prime Day yet. Shoppers reported several errors on both the desktop site and the mobile app. Amazon didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from CNBC about the glitches, but later posted on Twitter: "Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we're working to resolve the issue quickly. Many are shopping successfully — in the first hour of Prime Day in the U.S., customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year." Some users saw an error page featuring the "dogs of Amazon" and were initially unable to enter the site. Some got caught in a loop of pages urging them to "Shop all deals." Clicking the entry link for a specific category returned the user to the first page urging them to "Shop all deals." Some users successfully added items to their cart, only to receive an error message when trying to checkout and complete the purchase. Other users saw the "deals" page and "Shop all deals" button disappear entirely.

Total Retail's Take: Even the behemoth Amazon isn't immune to site performance issues. Despite all of the load testing that's likely done in advance of Prime Day, Amazon's biggest shopping day of the year, it's difficult to forecast and be ready for the surge of traffic that comes when the deals go live. Considering that Amazon is forecast to rake in upwards of $3.4 billion in sales during the 36-hour sales event, any service interruption costs the retailer hundreds of millions in lost sales. Don't let site performance issues cost your business lost sales; check out this article from Total Retail on the site performance issues that online retailers should be focused on to increase revenue.