Amazon paid media outlets to generate hype around its Prime Day "holiday," according to a report by The Guardian.
The e-tail giant's annual "holiday," established in 2015, took place on Tuesday, 12 July, and offered discounts to users buying products on Amazon.com.
Via Amazon's Associates Programme for advertisers, media partners are offered a tool that generates unique hyperlinks to Amazon products, which they can slot into online articles, The Guardian reports.
The unique hyperlink allows Amazon to track whether a specific visitor was directed to its Web site from a particular partner publication, and, if the visitor makes a purchase, offer partners rewards of 1% to 8.5% of a purchased products' value.
Amazon also offers partners $3 for each new user they lead to sign up for a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, the e-tailer's paid membership service which offers free e-books, music and video streaming, photo storage, free two-day shipping and early access to certain deals on the site.
One Prime Day deal offered Prime subscribers Dash buttons - which users can place around their home and press once to order a top-up of a specific commonly-used product - for 99 US cents each. As Dash buttons come with $4.99 in Amazon.com credit (and continued to do so on Prime Day), Mashable wrote that Amazon was essentially "paying [users] to get a Dash button".
Misleading
The media partnerships served not only to boost Amazon.com purchases and Amazon Prime subscriptions, but to incentivise encouragement to participate in an event that was not without its glitches.
While the US Federal Trade Commission guidelines stipulate publishers must disclose commercial arrangements "clearly and conspicuously" rather than "in obscure places" such as "buried on an 'about us' or 'general info' page," many news sites' lists of Prime Day deals made no discernible mention of commercial agreements with Amazon.
Beyond individual publications' coverage, the partnership deals impacted Google search results. A Google News search of "Amazon Prime Day" at the time of writing reveals lists of Prime Day deals on news Web sites, some pushing coverage of the event's mishaps further down the search results page.
While many articles push Prime Day deals, some note a technical mishap on the day that stopped numerous users from being able to add items to their virtual shopping carts.
Fortune notes that early reports indicate the event was a financial mixed bag for Amazon, as "US sales were flat... compared with last year... but [sales] were up 12% in the UK".
USA Today reports Prime Day acts as a "test run" for Black Friday, allowing Amazon to iron out any supply chain problems before frenzied US shoppers seize upon post-Thanksgiving deals in anticipation of Christmas.
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