Amazon Prime Day disappointment highlights Alibaba’s superiority

When I first heard about Amazon Prime Day, I thought: Finally Amazon is going to copy Alibaba’s Singles Day. Prime Day, which many Asian readers probably haven’t heard of, was billed as a massive sales day for Prime members at the American ecommerce giant. Amazon boasted that on Wednesday it would be offering “more deals than Black Friday.” It sounded like Jeff Bezos was finally planning to take a page out of Jack Ma’s book and create a web shopping holiday that would bring millions of shoppers to Amazon’s virtual doors all at once.

Singles Day, for those that don’t already know, was a niche joke holiday that Alibaba co-opted and quickly turned into the world’s biggest single shopping day. While other Chinese etailers have since glommed on, offering their own Singles Day deals, there’s no denying that Singles Day was Alibaba’s creation and it’s still primarily associated with Alibaba platforms like Taobao and Tmall. On Singles Day, Chinese shoppers log on to a full day of massive discounts on highly desirable products, and the result is record-breaking sales numbers every year.

Amazon, despite being as big in the West as Alibaba is in China, has never had a day like this. Cyber Monday, meant to be the online answer to America’s Black Friday offline shopping holiday, isn’t Amazon-specific (nor was it Amazon’s idea), and more broadly the site isn’t really known for sales or deals.

Prime Day promised to change that, but by all accounts it was a huge disappointment. Disgruntled shoppers compared the day’s deals to a garage sale, complaining that most of the deals on offer were garbage, and those few that were appealing were so limited that stocks sold out in minutes.

In the end, Prime Day proved to be a better source of jokes than it did deals:

#PrimeDay is like when grandma says "help yourself to the candy jar!" but it has nothing but raisins and sugar-free salt water taffy.

— Cassie Nicole (@_cassie90) July 15, 2015

Congratulations @amazon! Thanks to #PrimeDay, The Phantom Menace is no longer the most disappointing thing in my lifetime.

— Robert Zimmerman (@robzimm) July 15, 2015