Amazon’s Offer to Customers – More Wii, PS3

Internet retail giant and pioneer Amazon.com had a special offering for customers during the last week of the year. It put out on its list, besides the usual merchandise, allocations of Nintendo Co.’s Wii and Sony Corp’s PS3. This offer was for the year-end. The offer was a significant one – while PS3 was unleashed on the US retail market on November 17, 2006, Wii dropped to the US retail market on November 19.

Amazon.com’s offer consisted of additional inventory for each of these two consoles, and was made on Friday, December 29, 2006. The announcement regarding the offer was made the previous day. The consoles were made available for purchase between 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST. The offer had the desired impact, with all the items being sold out by the time it was 11. In fact, there were many customers who had to return empty-handed.

2006 has been a fantastic year for gamers. The year saw the return of big players Sony as well as Nintendo to the gaming arena with consoles, after a gap of five years. The hype reached near-frenetic levels with promos and campaigns targeted at increasing the interest levels of customers.

Nintendo’s Wii has so far lived up to its pre-launch billing. The company predicts sales of around four million consoles by the end of the year. Wii has made its mark in the minds of the customer, be it because of its casual and core game offerings, or its odd name, or the damage is has caused to over-enthusiastic gamers.

Sony Corp has not been doing too badly with its PS3 either. The console has come back into inventory after its initial sell-out performance. There have been a few glitches, like some production problems with the Blu-ray consoles. However, Sony estimates a sale of two million consoles over the year.

This is not the first time PS3 and Wii have been featured on Amazon’s list. Amazon had offered these to customers at an earlier instance, through a random draw that it called Amazon’s Customer Vote.