Amazon announces best holiday season ever


While most retailers were looking at dismal holiday shopping seasons this year, online retailer Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced that it had its best holiday season in history.

Early indications are showing that retail sales figures could be down as much as 5.5 to 8% during this year, as rising unemployment and general concern over the economy has led to most consumers tightening up their spending this year.

Amazon, which has probably actually been benefiting from the current economic slowdown, saw massive sales on December 15, which is typically the company's strongest day of the year. This year it saw sales of 6.3 million and shipments of 5.6 million units on the 15th, its strongest day in history.


We looked earlier this week at how Amazon has been able to steadily gain market share from eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), which has seen its holiday shopping traffic drop by around 16%, while Amazon on the other side of the coin was witnessing a traffic increase of a modest 6% between November 3 and December 14, when compared to the same period last year.

Hot-selling items this year for Amazon were the very popular Nintendo Wii video game, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPod's and Blokus board games.

Where did you do your online shopping this holiday season?

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor's Observer.

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Last updated: February 09, 2012: 04:47 PM

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