Amazon Prime Day has arrived - the sales holiday the internet lovingly dubbed last year as Amazon’s online garage sale, in reference to consumers’ disappointment with the deals’ quality. The company still broke sales records, despite complaints. This time around, Amazon is aiming to best last year’s deals with a good handful of price drops on Amazon devices, including Echo speakers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Kindles, Dash buttons, and more, along with Black Friday-like discounts on other electronics, like HDTVs, smartphones, speakers, headphones, wearables, and more. Aimed at growing the number of subscribers to its Prime Membership program, Prime Day deals are only available to Prime customers. However, Amazon offers a 30-day free trial which can help non-members shop the deals before having to pony up for the annual $99 membership. But Amazon still has a lot to prove in terms of consumer sentiment. Last year, the best deals sold out too quickly, while consumers were stuck with deals on household goods and other odds and ends. This c ontent w as generated with GS A Content Generator DEMO!
It remains to be seen how well Prime Day will perform this year. Demand for the new deals, however, appears to be strong - or at least, that’s likely what’s been causing this morning’s glitches. Prime Day got off to a rocky start, as many shoppers began experiencing trouble at checkout and Sales in adding items to their cart. Amazon tweeted that it’s "working to resolve this issue quickly," but the headaches could impact Prime Day’s bottom line if not resolved. Some customers are reporting difficulty with checkout. We're working to resolve this issue quickly. The issue has led to some customers missing the deals they wanted, given that many of the discounts offered on the site are time-sensitive. … add to cart failed… Hopefully, Amazon will fix the problem quickly, because there are actually quite a few great deals to be found this year. There are also deals on Xbox One, Lenovo laptops and desktops, iRobot vacuums, Bose headphones, TV deals from Samsung, Roku and more, Amazon Fashion Motorola smartphones, Pebble Steel smartwatches and other wearables from Microsoft, Garmin, Withings and others, and many more. Amazon notes also that customers will find twice as many Prime Day deals this year. In addition to the bigger deals, over 30 percent of the Lightning Deals come from Amazon sellers and small businesses. In total, shoppers worldwide have access to over 100,000 deals. If Amazon’s checkout issues continue, however, consumers could end up on competitors’ sites. This year, Walmart stepped up its game against Prime Day, offering a week of free shipping with no minimum purchase. Other retailers, including Gap, J.C. Penney, Newegg, and Toys R Us are also having rival sales.
Internal documents reveal how a former aide to Joe Biden helped the tech giant build a lobbying juggernaut that has gutted legislation in two dozen states seeking to give consumers more control over their data. Filed Nov. 19, 2021, 11 a.m. Amazon executives and staffers detail these lobbying victories in confidential documents reviewed by Reuters. In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California, the company stifled proposed restrictions on the industry’s collection and sharing of consumer voice recordings gathered by tech devices. And in its home state of Washington, Amazon won so many exemptions and amendments to a bill regulating biometric data, such as voice recordings or facial scans, that the resulting 2017 law had "little, if any" impact on its practices, according to an internal Amazon document. The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama.
Hired by Amazon in 2015, Carney reported to founder Jeff Bezos and built a lobbying and public-policy juggernaut that has grown from two dozen employees to about 250, according to Amazon documents and two former employees with knowledge of recent staffing. One 2018 document reviewing executives’ goals for the prior year listed privacy regulation as a primary target for Carney. One objective: "Change or block US and EU regulation/legislation that would impede growth for Alexa-powered devices," referring to Amazon’s popular voice-assistant technology. The mission included defeating restrictions on artificial intelligence and biometric technologies, along with blocking efforts to make companies disclose the data they keep on consumers. This story is based on a Reuters review of hundreds of internal Amazon documents and interviews with more than 70 lobbyists, advocates, policymakers and their staffers involved in legislation Amazon targeted, along with 10 former Amazon public-policy and legal employees. It is the third in a series of reports revealing how the company has pursued business practices that harm small businesses or put its own interests above those of consumers.
The previous articles showed how Amazon has circumvented e-commerce regulations meant to protect Indian retailers, and how it copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands over those of other vendors on its India platform. In a statement, Amazon said: "The premise of this story is flawed and includes reporting that relies on early, incomplete drafts of documents to draw incorrect conclusions." The company said it protects consumers’ privacy and doesn’t sell their data. Amazon said the 2018 document listing Carney’s goals to defeat privacy regulation is "out-of-date" and does not reflect the company’s current public-policy objectives. The company said it has opposed "poorly crafted" state privacy bills. Amazon’s lobbying against privacy protections aims to preserve the company’s access to detailed consumer data that has fueled its explosive online-retailing growth and provided an advantage in emerging technologies, according to the Amazon documents and former employees. The data Amazon Beauty amasses includes Alexa voice recordings; videos from home-camera systems; personal health data from fitness trackers; and data on consumers’ web-searching and buying habits from its e-commerce business.