Amazon Registers Record-Breaking 2019 Holiday Season

Third-Party sellers sold more than a billion items in Amazon's stores this holiday season

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Dec 27, 2019
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Amazon (AMZN, Financial) has experienced a record-breaking 2019 holiday season, defined in the sales world as the period from November 1 to December 24.

Although Amazon came out with its annual post-holiday press release, the report lacked key information such as number of shoppers, items ordered and average amount of money spent per customer. The holiday season witnessed "billions of items ordered worldwide" by customers online. On Thursday, the company named a few of its top-selling products, which included Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote and the Echo Show 5.

The online retailer saw robust third-party sales as well. The combined sales by small and medium-sized businesses in Amazon’s stores edged past a billion items, up by double digits compared to 2018.

Shifting gears, more people signed up to Amazon Prime this holiday season compared to any other holiday season in the past. In one particular week, more than five million new customers globally got their hands on either Prime free trials or paid memberships. Given the huge number of Prime members Amazon has, “the number of items that were delivered with Prime Free One-Day and Prime Free Same-Day Delivery nearly quadrupled compared to the same time period last holiday season, making this Amazon’s fastest holiday yet.” Compared with last year, 60% more customers shipped their products to an Amazon pick-up point instead of their homes or businesses.

Amazon’s logistics efforts

Amazon recently announced that third-party sellers are prohibited from using FedEx’s (FDX, Financial) ground delivery network for managing Prime shipments by citing a decline in FedEx’s ground delivery service performance in times when holiday shipments were huge. This left the sellers with the options of using either Amazon's own network or one of company’s other delivery partners.

Amazon’s stock has been moving up thanks to the robust logistical improvements it brought to tackle the enormous numbers this holiday week. This will bear a positive impact on the company’s long-term growth. Amazon has been pushing to build a strong delivery network, more so after the company began offering one-day delivery service to its Amazon Prime members. The company has invested as much as $800 million during the year of 2019 to ramp up the program.

Amazon’s stock surged more than 3% on Dec. 26 in intraday trading after it announced the record-breaking holiday season.

Disclosure: I do not hold any positions in the stocks mentioned.

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