Proposal to Develop a Practical Plan to Improve the User Experience of Amazon Prime Day

To:        Sam Edwards, Senior Director

From: Yolanda Zhou, Associate, Digital Marketing Analysis

Date: August 26, 2015

Subject: Proposal to develop a practical plan to improve the user experience of Amazon Prime Day

Proposal

In celebration of its 20th birthday, Amazon created a one-day event exclusively for Amazon Prime members. We have “Prime Day “ every year but this time we claimed that we would offer more deals than traditional Black Friday, which was expected to boost and replicate sales seen during Black Friday and Cyber Monday in summer months. However, we have to admit that the feedback from our consumers wasn’t quite positive. The hashtags including: #unhappyPrimeDay, #AmazonFail, #gobacktosleep, and #PrimeDayFail, if indicative of the majority , suggest we did not have quite the impact we had anticipated.

According to complains on social media and reviews on our own website, consumers’ complains mainly focus on two aspects. First, we failed to provide blockbuster deals. The discounts weren’t as good as we claimed. Second, our inventory was lower than expected. Many customers disappointedly discovered that deals were already sold out by the time they logged onto the site.

I would like to propose a project to improve our strategy for Prime Day to attract and satisfy our consumers. Specifically, we need to investigate the consumer demand and behavior on the promotional campaign, and then revise our plan on the promotional category, inventory, logistics, IT support and etc. My purpose is to gain support from the leadership and resources from several departments in order to execute the project effectively and put it forward smoothly.

Rationale

It is undeniable that our Prime program is an invaluable asset. That’s why we make Prime Day events to draw in new and existing customers with flash sales, large deals, and more. But if our event is actually not as good as we claimed, it would strongly disappoint our customers, especially loyal ones. Once the customers felt cheated, we will take unimaginable efforts to regain their trust. In a long run, it will hurt our reputation and brand. A thoroughly researched and practical plan for Prime Day will help us to examine and summarize the pros and cons of this event, correct the mistakes we made and achieve real success in next Prime Day.

Research Plan

I propose five stages to this plan.

(1) The first stage is about investigating the consumer experience of the Prime Day in order to figure out the problems in this event. I will collect the consumers’ opinions towards Prime Day in several platforms, including social media, Amazon website, and newspaper reports. The main information needed includes two aspects:  Prime Day participation, the degree to which new prime consumers and existing prime consumers participated and where and how they acquire the Prime Day information. The degree of satisfaction, the estimated percentage of satisfaction and dissatisfaction among customers and the main problems of our Prime Day that troubles the customers and their proposal to improvement.

Besides, I will issue questionnaires to prime customers to collect detailed data of customers’ opinions.

(2) The second stage is a survey among employees in Amazon to assess the Prime Day event. I will interview with employees in Amazon involved in the Prime Day event to find out practical difficulties and collect their advices. Then I will summarize and analyze the reports of Prime Day event finished by all related departments.

(3) Thirdly, I will implement a review of other company’s successful big sales in recent years, including successful sales campaign cases worldwide, such as the November. 11th Sale Day of Alibaba from China, whose sales surpassed our total sales volume of Back Friday and Boxing Day and our competitors’ sales campaign (e.g. Walmart).