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Amazon Sales Record

Arcadi writes "Amazon set a new record of items sold on a single day. More than 2.8 million units or 32 items per second. That's a big store."

4 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Which day? by Albinofrenchy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From what I've seen, Amazon won't say which day the record was set, or why they won't say which day the record was set. Why the secrecy?

    --
    "A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -Mahatma Gandhi
  2. Profitability? by jacobcaz · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I wonder what the profit on those 2.8 million items was? It would be interesting to know if it was just a huge pile of loss leaders or bigger ticket items (which might shed some interesting light on the economy and holiday season in general).

    I'm still hearing conflicting reports on the holiday season overall - it was great, it was terrible, it was tepid... I'm still not sure how things went down; I know this year my wife and I probably spent a little less than last year despite our earning over 40% more than last year.

    This is great news...maybe. I would just like more context.

  3. For comparison? by suso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does anyone have any statistics on how many items say, a single retail store (like Wal-mart) sells in a single day? How about all of the stores in a chain. Data like that would help put things in perspective.

  4. Re:32 items per second? Wow! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'll let you in on a little secret - Amazon.com's codebase was C (now most likely migrated to C++, to take advanatge of things lik OOP among other reasons). It consisted of a gazillion modules which compiled to give you ONE BINARY, called obidos - check out the URL then you'll see what I'm saying. This one binary is then tied to Apache, and then fed out to their 500+ webservers. But the beauty of it is there redundancy measures. At any given time there are 3 copies the binary, a, b & c. a = The latest code. b = yesterday's stable build. c = another stable build. In case there's a bug in some build, they simply have to flip the switch to get an up and running site. It was great, but the part that's a BITCH is developing this stuff. Imagine having to re-compile all of Amazon, just to FIX A BLASTED TYPO. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...