Errors on Amazon.com in the opening hours of its Prime Day sale cost Amazon sales.

Amazon.com Inc. may have lost as much as $72.4 million in sales yesterday when many U.S. consumers could not place orders on Amazon.com due to website errors.

The pictures of very cute dogs shown on Amazon’s error pages aren’t going to make that loss hurt less.

The opening minutes of Amazon Prime Day in the U.S. was fraught with problems, which were shared widely on social media. Many shoppers received error messages both on the site and in the app while shopping for Prime Day deals. Other shoppers reported not being able to add products to their cart, as well as having previous items erased from their cart.

Site monitoring service Down Detector says Amazon’s biggest problems occurred during the first 63 minutes of the Prime Day sale yesterday, although some problems persisted throughout the evening. Prime Day started at 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time yesterday and runs through tonight. Site issues also were reported on other Amazon country-specific sites but were much more limited than what happened in the United States.

Internet Retailer projected last week Amazon would generate $2.5 billion in sales from U.S. consumers during the 36-hour sale. Using that figure and Down Detector’s data that the primary issues lasted 63 minutes, Internet Retailer estimates Amazon may have lost as much as $72.4 million in revenue from U.S. consumers.

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Internet Retailer projects Amazon will generate $4.04 billion in sales globally during the Prime Day promotion, up 67% from the 30-hour sale last year. Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 1000.

 

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