Amazon Prime helped the marketplace set records for its 21st holiday shopping season. More than three million members worldwide joined Prime during the third week of December alone, and over 200 million more items shipped for free with Prime this holiday season compared to last year’s season.
Amazon released the holiday statistics on Monday.
Noticeably absent from the US and Canadian press releases was any mention of third-party merchants. However, Amazon UK had a few noteworthy tidbits in its release:
- UK-based marketplace sellers sold over 80 million units on Amazon sites worldwide worth over 1 billion pounds this Christmas season. 46% of units purchased by customers on Amazon sites worldwide were sold by 3P sellers.
- On Black Friday (November 27), Marketplace sellers sold more than 2.7 million items, and the number of units sent on Black Friday through FBA was up by more than 70% year-over-year.
- Around 40% of all units stocked in Amazon’s UK fulfillment centers are FBA products from marketplace sellers.
- Since Christmas season last year, the number of UK-based sellers exporting products to customers outside of Britain has increased 54%.
- UK-based marketplace sellers are set to hit nearly 1.4 billion pounds in total export sales and surpass 100 million in exported units for the year. This is in addition to the billions of pounds in revenue generated by the sales of hundreds of millions of units in the UK.
- The number of UK Pro-sellers on Amazon Marketplace was up 43% since Q4 2014
As far as Amazon’s US announcement, the company provided no details on the exact numbers of Amazon Prime members, citing the same stat it has previously released: there are “tens of millions” of Amazon Prime members worldwide.
Prime members shopped more than 30,000 Lightning Deals on Amazon.com with Prime Early Access, and Prime members shopping via mobile more than doubled this holiday in the US.
Amazon.com also said the 2015 holiday shopping season was the best for its own devices, doubling last year’s sales with millions of devices sold. “Among Amazon devices, the all-new Fire tablet was the #1 best-selling, most gifted and most wished-for product across the millions of items available on Amazon.com since its introduction 15 weeks ago,” the company said.
A record number of units shipped worldwide with Amazon Prime, and Prime Now had its busiest day ever on Christmas Eve.
Amazon shipped to 185 countries this holiday, and customers across 10 countries took advantage of Amazon’s first global Black Friday Deal of the Day, and customers shopping at smile.amazon.com have generated tens of millions of dollars for charities since the program was launched. So far, over 100,000 organizations have received donations from AmazonSmile.
