"Doorbuster" to Prime Day
An Amazon lesson
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Before Prime Day, Amazon struggled to compete with retailers on Black Friday and broke its website trying.
So Amazon created its own holiday that others now envy and copy.
This story will help you improve your business insight and technical chops.
Historically, retail stores offered "doorbusters" or super low-priced items to bring you to the store.
These were a big problem for Amazon.
In retail stores, you know that once people are in the store they are likely to buy other things they need or see. This allows a retail store to offer a hot product at a deeply discounted price, counting on you to buy a bunch of other stuff so that your total purchase is still profitable.
Local stores also write "while supplies last" on their ads, allowing them to offer a small number of the “hot” items at a huge discount, and then say "sorry" when it is all gone. People still come to the store, too late for the discount, and yet end up buying lots of regular price stuff.
Amazon tried to copy this and failed.
Lesson: Do not exactly copy a physical approach online!
In the early days, Amazon always wanted to have the best price.
This led Amazon to scour ads looking for the lowest price on any item and offering it at an equal or lower price on Amazon.
This created three problems.
Problem 1: Hundreds of different stores, each offering a few deeply discounted items, meant Amazon was trying to match hundreds or 1000s of discounts. This violates the idea that you bring people in for one or two discounts and then sell them other stuff at a regular price.
Problem 2: If you offer 10 of something at a store, customer 11 is disappointed but may understand. If you offer only 10 of something on Amazon it seems ridiculous, like a scam.
Problem 3: You do not drive to Amazon or walk the aisles. At Amazon, you "spearfish" - you type in the item you want, buy it, and leave. There is no "basket" of other items you collect while shopping.
The "doorbuster" idea works great in the physical world but translates poorly to the digital world.
It also causes site outages.
Sometimes people line up at physical stores and rush the doors to get the deals. But online, you get a "Taylor Swift Concert" effect, where real people and bots line up and hammer a page, all trying to hit the buy button the instant a good deal becomes available.
Amazon designed a denial-of-service attack against itself and early holiday sales often crashed at least the page if not the whole website.
The tech lesson is do not create a flash load on your own services!
Don't directly copy an offline process.
If my advice has helped you and you want to go more in-depth, do consider my Prime Day newsletter and course sale.
Amazon vets, share your lessons from Holiday or Prime Day!
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Level Up is your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans.
Meta lesson: don’t copy something that your competitor is doing — understand how to take that principle and apply it to the needs of YOUR customer. In the example of Prime day, it’s a tool for building more value into the Prime membership and encourage purchases a few months before Black Friday.