For retailers, the holiday shopping season was the worst in decades. Even so, Amazon.com said Friday that it had its “best ever” holiday.
On Amazon’s peak day, Dec. 15, customers ordered a record 6.3 million items, or almost 73 items each second, the company said. Last year, the peak day was Dec. 10, when customers ordered 5.4 million items.
Amazon’s press release has all sorts of entertaining factoids: the weight of all GPS devices it sold from Black Friday through December equals the combined weight of 151 Mini Coopers; it sold enough “Breaking Dawn” books that, if stacked end to end, they would reach the summit of Mount Everest eight times; and its top sellers in electronics included a 52-inch Samsung LCD HDTV and the eight-gigabyte Apple iPod Touch.
But the numbers do little to tell us how good (or bad) Amazon’s season really was. The company didn’t disclose whether shoppers bought more or fewer high-priced items than in previous years or whether discounts ate into profit margins. It didn’t disclose revenue or even the total volume of products it shipped throughout the holiday season.
What’s more, as consumers do more and more of their shopping online, where Amazon is the leading retailer, a “record” season at Amazon is hardly surprising. Amazon has claimed that its holidays were the “best ever” or “busiest ever” every year since at least 2002.
As Douglas Anmuth, an analyst at Barclays Capital, said in a note to investors early Friday: “AMZN’s announcement this A.M. that it posted another record holiday season should not come as a surprise given the ongoing secular shift toward e-comm., along w/ AMZN’s continued mkt share gains, but it appears likely to move the stock some in the N-T [near-term] given the lack of positive retail news flow & thin overall trading.”
The near-term stock gain did materialize, but it was short-lived. After the opening, Amazon shares traded as high as $53.95, a nearly 5 percent gain from their pre-Christmas close of $51.44. But shares slid throughout the day and closed at $51.78, up just 0.66 percent.
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