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Still in its Prime, Amazon is reporting (another) record holiday sales season.
The e-commerce giant announced Monday that during the week before Christmas it added more than 3 million subscribers to Prime, the $99-per-year service that offers complimentary two-day and sometimes same-day deliveries.
During the holiday season, which Amazon defines as November 1 to December 19, more than 200 million items were shipped for free to Prime subscribers. Amazon sold more than twice as many of its own branded devices during this holiday season than last.
E-commerce giant Amazon is again reporting a strong holiday sales season fueled by adding 3 million people to its Prime subscription service.
Amazon
In what’s become an annual post-Christmas tradition, Amazon released interesting figures about its holiday season. While the Seattle-based retailer doesn’t reveal exactly how many Prime subscribers it has, it is boasting that now “there are tens of millions of members.” It’s estimated that Prime has some 47 million US accounts.
The Amazon Fire 7-inch tablet was the company’s best seller. Amazon’s Fire Kids Edition and Fire HD 6 were also popular with Santa. Other top-selling tech-related items on Amazon included smart TVs by Samsung and Roku; Toshiba laptops; GoPro Hero4 silver cameras; and Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Fallout 4 and Star Wars Battlefront video games.
Almost 70 percent of Amazon customers shopped on a mobile device during the holiday period. The number of Prime members in the US who used a smartphone to purchase holiday items more than doubled from last year. The number of customers using Amazon’s mobile app doubled from 2014’s total. The company processed 33 electronics orders per second from a mobile device on Cyber Monday, which is traditionally the year’s biggest online sales day in the United States. Cyber Monday this year was November 30.
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Also on Cyber Monday, Amazon said it sold a copy of pop star Adele’s latest multiplatinum CD, “25,” every three seconds. The album has sold more than 7 million copies in the US alone since its November 20 release.
Here are a few more random facts Amazon compiled relating to its top-selling gifts this holiday season:
- It sold enough Jenga sets to reach the top of the Empire State Building more than 70 times.
- It sold more than enough 50-inch TVs to span the average width of the Grand Canyon.
- It sold enough running shoes to give every participant of the New York, Chicago and Boston marathons three pairs of shoes — one for each race.
- People bought more jeans than could cover the driving distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles — that’s nearly 400 miles.
- People spent enough hours reading “The Martian” on Kindle (the novel based on this year’s blockbuster film starring Matt Damon) to add up to 1,000 trips to Mars.
