EBay plans to crash Amazon’s annual discount extravaganza, Prime Day 2019.
EBay said on Wednesday that it would hold a one-day Crash Sale on July 15, coinciding with the kickoff to Amazon’s two-day Prime Day.
The term “Crash Sale” is clearly an effort by EBay to troll Amazon. Last year, Amazon’s website briefly crashed after customers flooded the site.
Tongue in check, eBay said on Wednesday that if Amazon’s site crashes, its site would be ready for shoppers. Amazon hasn’t responded to the joke or commented on whether it has done anything to avoid another crash.
Amazon, which announced its Prime Day sales dates on Tuesday, promised deals on millions of products, including televisions, Amazon Alexa-based devices like the Amazon Echo, and products from small and medium-sized business partners on Amazon Marketplace. Last year, Amazon said customers bought more than 100 million products during the two-day Prime Day and that it broke its single-day sales record.
Since Amazon Prime Day has become such a big shopping event, it’s little surprise that eBay is trying to insinuate itself into it. Although it started as an auction site, eBay has heavily shifted into fixed-price retail, including by major retailers, in an effort to compete with Amazon and others.
In a sign of Prime Day’s power, eBay isn’t alone in trying to capitalize on it. Target said on Tuesday that it would also offer deals on hundreds of thousands of products on July 15 and July 16.
Other Amazon competitors, like Best Buy, Walmart, and NewEgg, haven’t mentioned anything about debuting rival discount days to Prime Day. But if eBay and Target are any indication, Prime Day, or at least the dates on which it falls, is quickly becoming as big a shopping holiday as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the bookends to the busy Thanksgiving shopping holiday.
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