This week in web performance news we saw an uproarious reaction to Amazon’s Prime Day, Google add the ability to purchase on Google, Facebook begin testing e-commerce pages, and Firefox temporarily ban Adobe Flash for security reasons.
#PrimeDayFail? Not according to Amazon
To celebrate its 20th anniversary this week, Amazon hyped up its first ever Prime Day, a one-day online sales event for Prime members. The sales day of the year, advertised to have more deals than Black Friday, turned out to be what many shoppers considered an overhyped e-garage sale. As many disappointed customers took to Twitter to complain about the false advertising, many others took to Twitter to enjoy the hilarity of the “Lightning Deals”. If you were looking for packs of granny panties, 55-gallon drums of lubricant, a plate of ham, or family packs of brass knuckles, you were in luck! Despite the complaints, Greg Greeley, Amazon Prime’s Vice President, extended a thank you “to the hundreds of thousands of new members who signed up on Prime Day, and our tens of millions of existing members for making our first ever Prime Day a huge success.” Global records were broken, with order growth exceeding Black Friday 2014 by 18%. Customers ordered an average of 398 items per second! With those numbers, Greeley declared that Amazon will “definitely be doing this again.”
Google releases “Purchases on Google”
Google has now made it possible to buy products directly from mobile search results. The “buy” option will be seen on promoted mobile search results, and will simply facilitate the purchase from merchants, rather than cut out the middleman entirely. Eligible advertisements with the “buy” option will be taken to a retailer-branded product page hosted by Google, in an effort to improve mobile conversions. The new feature will also give users the ability to save payment credentials for future purchases.
Facebook testing e-commerce pages
Facebook will soon offer businesses with Facebook pages a way to sell content directly through the platform. Emma Rodgers, Facebook product marketing manager remarked, “With the shop section on the page, we’re now providing businesses with the ability to showcase their products directly on the page.”
By allowing them to build Facebook e-commerce pages, Facebook is evolving into much more than a place to socialize and share content. The social media giant recently introduced the ability to send money through its messenger, and is rumored to be developing a virtual Messenger assistant to facilitate production research and purchases.
Firefox bans Adobe Flash plugin, calls for security updates
After blocking all versions of Adobe Flash from running in Firefox, Mozilla reinstated the plugin Wednesday. Two zero-day flaws prompted the default blocking of Flash player, which disabled millions of users from watching videos or interacting with certain content through the browser. Adobe Flash has been widely criticized by tech experts due to security and compatibility issues. The security risks were resolved in a security fix Flash released two days later in their latest version, and Firefox once again enabled Flash by default in the browser. A new version was released for Linux as well.