Although Taylor was frustrated, she didn’t try to shop on other sites, even though there were deals, and she didn’t really think about giving up, she told me. As a Prime member, Amazon is just more convenient than other sites: It guarantees free shipping on many items, whereas other sites often only offer free shipping on orders of $35 or more. “It’s just the free shipping and convenience. Instead of fighting people up in the department store, I can go there and it comes right to my door,” she said. This despite the fact that, as an affiliate marketer, Taylor was losing money every time someone clicked a link on her blog, tried to buy a product, and then couldn’t complete the sale.

Amazon was caught flat-footed by the site’s failure on Prime Day, and it’s surprising that a company that talked up the promotion for days ahead of time was so unprepared, especially a company that is growing a large part of its business based on selling cloud computing through Amazon Web Services. But if Amazon learned anything from its Prime Day experience, it’s probably that people will keep shopping on the site, no matter how much it fails. The Prime Day failures, rather than highlighting an opening for other retailers, suggest that Amazon’s competitors are going to have a very hard time breaking its hold on retail, where it accounts for nearly half of all e-commerce sales in the United States.

“I would view this as negligible,” says Daniel Ives, the chief strategy officer and head of technology research at GBH Insights in New York, about the glitches. GBH estimated, before Prime Day, that Amazon would generate $3.6 billion in sales on Prime Day, up from $2.4 billion last year, when the event was six hours shorter. Ives still thinks Amazon is on track to hit those numbers, despite the glitches.

Amazon also uses Prime Day to sign up new Prime members, hoping to get more people to shell out $119 a year for the club, up from $99. The company surprised analysts earlier this year by revealing it had 100 million Prime members globally. Ives said he thinks Prime membership will grow a further 25 percent in the next 18 months, helped in part by the Prime Day push. “This was another shot in the arm for Prime Day sign-ups,” he says.

Amazon said in a release that Prime Day sales were higher than ever. Though it did not provide numbers, estimates by Feedvisor, an intelligence platform for online retailers, suggested that orders on Amazon Marketplace were up 69 percent from a year ago. Rather than providing specific numbers about sales, or explaining why the site had crashed, Amazon downplayed the problems with dog puns: “It wasn’t all a walk in the (dog) park, we had a ruff start—we know some customers were temporarily unable to make purchases. We still have hundreds of thousands of new deals today.”