(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc.’s merchant marketing portal crashed Tuesday night, according to several Amazon sellers and consultants, derailing one of the online retailer’s biggest sales of the year.
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The advertising portal is a self-service system where merchants and brands can adjust their advertising budgets and bid on keywords so their products appear in response to consumer queries. Without this online interface, brands are flying blind with their Amazon advertising spend.
This year’s Prime Day sale, a two-day wave of discounts, got off to a fast start on Tuesday, with a sales increase of nearly 12% in the first seven hours compared to the same period last year, according to with Momentum Commerce, which manages 50 brands across a variety of product categories. It’s a pivotal moment for Amazon and its sellers.
“A small portion of advertisers had limited access to the Amazon Ads console for a brief period of time and we are now resolving the issue,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “There is no impact on ad delivery and advertisers’ campaigns continue to run as intended.”
Jed Rawson, whose consulting firm Pirawna manages Amazon accounts that sell nearly $500 million a year on the site, said several sellers are discussing the issue online. All of his customers were affected, and Bloomberg analyzed a private Slack channel for Amazon sellers, where four others reported having issues. Several Amazon consultants also discussed the flaw on LinkedIn.
Rawson said the portal didn’t work for about two hours before it was fixed. Amazon did not provide a timeframe for the outage.
(Updates with Amazon comment in fourth paragraph)
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