Hey Friends!

If you read last week’s post about Amazon’s 20th anniversary (called “Prime Day”), then you were probably hopeful and waiting like everyone else on the internet! Promised to be bigger than Black Friday, Prime Day was anything but that.

“Aw come on, Justin. It wasn’t THAT bad.”

• The Observer called it “The Internet’s Worst Clearance Rack“.
• First Slice called it “The Internet Yard Sale“.
• Gizmodo even further by listing the crappiest deals of Prime Day.
• Business Insider made a list of the best items, but Black Friday is still better.

Let’s take to Twitter!

Jeff Bezos had a bad case of “over promise, under deliver”. My brother told me days ago that “Bezos always delivers”. Better start eating those words, Alex.

I have some recommendations, Amazon.

Why do I care about this? Because I’m a librarian. I’m a seeker of information. I seek good prices for my hard-earned money, as should you be, too. Paying retail is for chumps. Stay tuned to the end and I’ll give you an additional tool to finding those good prices.

Let us know what’s going on

I get it, Amazon, you wanted to keep Prime Day items a big mystery. However, I should at least have the option flag a particular product and get an alert when it goes on sale during Prime Day. You guys already notify me when packages ship, get delivered, and when a wait-listed item is available…why not give us what we really want?

The popular app If This Then That (IFTTT) lets me know when prices change for items that I want at places like Best Buy, and that app is FREE. For $99/year, you can do better that that. This would be especially useful when new flash deals got unveiled throughout the day. Because, you know, no one wants to refresh their page every 10 minutes to see if anything new has come up.

Space deals out better

This was Prime Day, not the new Nintendo, iPhone or Apple Watch. Amazon made a whopping mistake in front-loading some of its best items at midnight PST. At 1, 2, and 3am for the rest of the USA is not when I want to be hunting for deals. When I checked at 2am, most of the items were so-so. A few hours later when I woke up for work, two of its major TV deals and hot items like the Amazon Echo were already gone.

It made zero sense to debut all the A-listers in the middle of the night, especially when the sale is just for Prime subscribers (and lasts all day). That lead to extreme disappointment for users who were either not in the know or felt on the fence about buying a product. Space the deals out and let the average person with a life have a chance of getting stuff.

Make it easy to find what I actually want

This part made me more frustrated than anything.

Seriously, you’re going to force me to navigate through stuff I don’t want?

I am restricted to seeing five random on-sale items at a time, and this is PAGE 1 OF 262?!

“But look! You can narrow it down by department!”

Great! Let’s look in electronics…96 PAGES.

Offer recommendations

That horrible interface could’ve been way easier if Amazon used its current arsenal, like using my order and browsing history to suggest items I’d be interested in.  Amazon already recommends items I might like or ones based on items I’ve viewed/bought, so why not show a similar algorithm on Prime Day?

Nobody deserves to slog through 260 pages of beard trimmers, work boots, krill oil, DVDs, bras, stereos and vitamins to get to the things they want.However, being forced to look at items I had no interest in buying did get me to buy a few things I wasn’t expecting. A chef’s hat for $3.49? Well, one of our part time kids just got accepted into a cooking school…you win that round, Amazon.

Be honest

The reason that Amazon Prime subscribers stay subscribers is because they like being treated well by Amazon; We like feeling important. I thought Amazon would treat its Prime members well on Prime Day, but it was really a warehouse-cleaning garage sale with the hopes of grabbing new Prime members who signed up for the 30 day trial and forget to cancel.

If you stay tuned to the end, then congrats! If you’ve never heard of Camel camel camel, then this may become your new best friend. CCC can compare and track prices for you on Amazon items, and can even notify you when the price changes. FREE!

If you’ve already heard of CCC, then I’ve really got nothing for you. Here’s a cute puppy!

AWWW

That’s all for this week, I hope you got a few good Prime deals!

Justin Brasher, Brash Librarian