Amazon’s latest press release reads like a litany of sugary good feelings. One million new Prime customers, super quick Mayday response times, and a widely increased media library for all this holiday season. If that’s not enough, the online shopping juggernaut claims that Cyber Monday saw them complete transactions for 426 items per second, or 36.8 million items total.
There are many excitable expletives we can use to respond to those claims. They all lead back to one, which is “wow”. In items sold alone, Amazon impresses, svn on a worldwide scale. They’re also claiming that Prime now has “tens of millions” users, but All Things D aptly points out that a December 2013 estimate from CIRP put them at 16 million as of the end of September, so those “tens” may be just over the crest of 20 million, allowing for the plurality of ‘tens’.
Amazon is also touting they now have “more than 27 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, books, audiobooks, and popular apps and games” up for grabs, with their TV and Movie catalog growing from 33,000 to 40,000 titles. Their Kindle lineup was a top seller, with Amazon noting the Kindle Fire HD, HDX 7-inch, and HDX 8.9-inch outpacing all other tablets this holiday season. We find that hard to believe, but at the price point they’re offered at, it’s plausible.
Interestingly, Amazon says that over half of their customers went shopping via a mobile device. According to their metrics, customers ordered “more than five toys per second” via mobile between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. Consoles like the Xbox One and Playstation 4 sold 1,000 units per minute at their peak. We’re having another “wow” moment.
Amazon also made an interesting comment about limiting Prime memberships during “peak periods” so existing members weren’t affected by the crush of new members. We’re not clear on when a “peak” time for memberships is, or how Amazon would limit them, but it was interesting commentary nonetheless. Unfortunately, they may have been foiled by the UPS/FedEx debacle this year.
Amazon also has some interesting factoids relating sales to other nonsense, like how Eminem album sales relate to actual M&M’s, but it’s all just a fun way to boast a bit about a great holiday shopping season. For the everyday user, the growing media catalog is great, we’d just like to be able to view it on our non-Amazon mobile devices. The continued use of the word “exclusive” in the press release only highlighted how much Amazon covets the Kindle/Prime handshake.
