Amazon felt no impact from the shorter holiday shopping season in the fourth quarter, according to Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky, who was speaking to Wall Street analysts on Thursday in a post-earnings conference call.
Many retailers and online merchants had been concerned because there were six fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas (Thanksgiving fell on November 29 in 2019.) The last time that occurred was in 2013.
Shipping carriers had also expressed concern about the prospect of delivering holiday packages in a shortened period of time, as noted by the Wall Street Journal in a December 2nd article titled, “Tight Holiday-Season Calendar Will Test UPS, FedEx and Amazon: Two billion packages must all find their way with fewer days to move them around the country this year.”
Olsavsky said Amazon believes that the way it works, at least for its business, is that customers have a holiday budget and will spend it beginning in mid-November (though that’s creeping to the early part of November) and through the holiday season.
He said Amazon does see spikes on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and a relative tick-up as the holiday and shipping-cutoff date nears.
Perhaps the 6 fewer days after Thanksgiving is a bigger issue for stores and foot traffic, he said, “but we don’t notice it in our business.”
You can read more about Amazon’s fourth-quarter earnings in this post on the AuctionBytes Blog.
