Inevitable happens as Amazon postpone Prime Day 2020

Prime Day and Black Friday are two dates that get circled on tech buyers calendars each year. They are an opportunity to pick up items you have had your eye on for a while, but we are going to have to hold our horses and wait as it looks like Amazon’s summer pricing extravaganza is getting a push back due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s obviously no surprise with the retailer facing logistics issues and scaling back parts of its operation to essential items only. Many drivers and warehouse operators are falling ill. There are problems just delivering high-priced items to customers and leaving them on the doorstep – although really most people have no excuse not to be in to accept them. Generally, people have also upped their orders of items that wouldn’t ordinarily be seeing such high demand.

While Amazon has declined to comment at this point, an internal memo seen by Reuters suggests Amazon could be hit by losses of around $100 million best case scenario and be left with five million items of stock they would ordinarily be expected to shift earlier.

At the moment the internal thinking seems to be to push back Prime day until August, but with the current uncertainty that cannot be guaranteed to happen then, and any further delays would see it creeping ever closer to Black Friday at the end of November.

These are testing times for all online retailers who so far have perhaps been able to keep at bay the issues bricks and mortar shops have faced due to at least being able to continue to trade, and in many cases benefit from increased web traffic.

As confusion continues to reign, however, it looks like any store with the best-laid plans may well now start to have to bring those back into sharp focus to see what is actually still viable to do in the weeks and months ahead.