• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 13, 2016

Amazon Prime Day, the online retailer's annual event full of flash sales and great deals, experienced a hiccup on what was to be one of their busiest shopping days of their year.

Consumers had no trouble searching for an item, but when it came time to add the item to their cart to make the purchase, reports suggest a different story.

Adobe Digital Insights released numbers late Tuesday that point to disappointment rather than success. The company measured sales and sentiment through a measurement of "Sadness" and "joy."

Some 38% of overall sentiment around Amazon Prime Day tipped to Sadness, compared with 50% last year. The needle pointing to Joy rose to 31% compared with 23% in 2015. About 22% of social sentiment is attributed to admiration and 9% to surprise. 

The main contributor to Sadness points to consumers having issues adding items to their cart and checking out, compared to last year, which focused on the lack of blockbuster deals, according to Adobe data.

Henry Blodget showed his Sadness in a Twitter tweet, when he wrote "Trying to buy Amazon Echo for $50 off on Prime Day … but Amazon overloaded!"

Amazon Echo, along with Kindle and Kindle-related products and Xbox One Bundle were among the most sought after products, according to Adobe. Overall, Prime Day received 165,000 mentions on social media.

Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray senior research analyst, wrote in a research note the cart glitch would likely have a minimal impact on sales. "In the early hours of Prime Day, Amazon's 'Add to Cart' button was not functioning properly; it is not clear how long or for which users the glitches lasted," per the report. "We believe that users will continue to attempt to checkout on Amazon, despite temporary glitches and that the bulk of Amazon Prime Day volume comes in the afternoon in the U.S."

Despite the glitches, global units grew 60%, compared with 54.5 million in 2015. In the U.S. those numbers grew 50%.

"Amazon hardware sales were yet again a highlight of the "holiday," with 150% growth in Amazon Fire TV devices globally, and 200% growth in all Amazon devices in the U.S.," per Piper Jaffray.

"Amazon Echo also saw 150% growth in the U.S. Amazon's presence within the home via connected devices continues to grow and we believe offers substantial opportunity to dominate automated consumption."

Overall, Prime subscriptions rose about 30%, compared with last year. Amazon confirmed Wednesday that Prime member orders on its app surpassed 2015 mobile app orders by more than atwo-times the amount globally. More than 1 million customers used the Amazon app for the first time on Prime Day to shop and to search for products and then watch-a-deal.

The Prime Photos sweepstakes had 2 million submissions worldwide during the lead-up to Prime Day. The winner will be randomly selected this week.