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Amazon.com Reporting This Holiday Season Their "Best Ever"

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the at-least-someone-doesn't-need-a-bailout dept.

In a refreshing break from all the doom and gloom, Amazon.com is calling this holiday season their best ever. Reporting a 44 percent rise in the number of items sold, they are refusing to provide actual dollar amounts, so it is still a very subjective measurement. "Amazon customers ordered more than 6.3 million items on Dec. 15, compared with roughly 5.4 million on its peak day last year, the company said. It shipped more than 5.6 million products on its best day, a 44 percent rise over 2007, when it shipped about 3.9 million on its busiest day. The company did not provide dollar figures and wouldn't say whether the average value of orders had changed, and the jumps it reported Friday are in line with increases Amazon has seen since it started releasing the figures in 2002."

5 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Money is tight by ppz003 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    People are going to look for better deals, and when some item can be found for 20 to 50% less online, often with free shipping, of course they are going to turn to the big internet sites.

    1. Re:Money is tight by Hijacked+Public · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think people look for deals whether the economy is good or bad. People generally want more than what they have regardless so better deals mean they can buy more stuff. Money gets tight you might see some impact on the wanna-be-rich items, like Cadillac Escalades and Coach handbags and crap like that, but staples still sell.

      And to add on to the 'doom and gloom' comment in the editorial: I live kind of in the boonies. Over the holidays I went to see family in a mid sized city and I expected to see some evidence of the economic times being hard. It was Indianapolis, so a lot of auto industry jobs. But every junk chain restaurant we went to was packed to capacity and had hour plus waits. Every mall parking lot was full. People at Fry's were carrying out big screen TVs and new MacBooks. Plenty of SUVs rolling around.

      I know housing is bad, and I know some residential contractors who are slow. And the auto industry is looking bad. But I don't get the newsmans's assertion that things are as bad as the Great Depression. My grandmother washed her paper towels and dried them on a clothesline in the Great Depression. I didn't see any paper towels on any clotheslines anywhere. Or any clotheslines at all for that matter. People seem to be getting along well enough. If Texas Roadhouse has a 45 minute wait for a lousy steak (and the closest restaurant to me is still 100% full every night) things must not be as bad as we are being led to believe.

      --
      "Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
  2. Amazon's real skill: hooking the media... by ThousandStars · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ... including /.

    See Slate's Amazon.con: How the online retail giant hoodwinks the press for details on why this story is idiotic:

    Some, but not all, of these accounts went on to concede that Amazon would not provide revenue data for the entire shopping season, or even for its "peak day." Nor would Amazon confirm or deny that one or both of these revenue figures exceeded those for 2007. Without this information, we can't possibly know whether Amazon had a good year in comparison either to other retailers or to its own sales during the previous Christmas shopping season.

    The same reasoning or lack thereof applies to the Kindle (which I don't like for its DRM and other problems), since Amazon won't release sales numbers for it.

    So, did Amazon have their best ever holiday season? Maybe: but we're unlikely to know enough about the metrics used to make this claim to know.

  3. No by copponex · · Score: 4, Interesting

    10-15% is an average gross margin for non-boutique retail. After overhead, making any money is good, and 3% isn't terrible when your sales number begins with a b.

    Back when there were smaller stores, the margin was typically 40%. But those days are over, and why I chuckle every time I hear someone complain about the service at a Best Buy or whatever. America traded in knowledgeable electronics dealers for cheap, plastic, slave-labor constructed garbage that are a tenth of the price and last about as long. That is, if you don't break the connectors that are glued to the pcb instead of screwed to plates, as they used to be. Now those same stores employing kids are charging three hundred dollars to fix the crappy electronics they sold them in the first place.

    Ah well. There is no free lunch. But there are a lot of people who aren't smart with their money. What were we talking about again?

  4. Re:One of my favorite places... by Kreigaffe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Have you tried to buy hdmi / dvi cable lately (and by lately I mean this was about 1.5yr ago)?
    Local store price for 6' section: $35-45
    Online vendor price for 6' section: Bout 7 bucks.

    And now I pretty much buy everything online. It's so much better and comparing prices doesn't burn up my time or gas.

    --
    ... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about. :|