It looks like Amazon had a good year, and a better Christmas this year, especially when we talk about their Echo devices. Echo Dot, the newer and smaller edition of the Echo, sold quite well on Amazon this holiday. In fact, it was Amazon’s top-selling item. Chances are though, this was probably spurred on by Dot’s lower price, as well as an aggressive discount by Amazon. They even had a “buy five, get one free” deal going on.
Amazon is is reporting its best-ever holiday season with a 9x surge in sales of the Echo device family compared to a year ago:
Customers purchased and gifted a record-setting number of devices from the Amazon Echo family with sales up over 9x compared to last year’s holiday season and millions of Alexa devices sold worldwide this year.
Of course, we have to take this information with a grain of salt. There’s hasn’t been an official, Amazon-supplied baseline sales figure for the company’s own devices. Amazon says that they’ve sold “millions” but that’s pretty vague. In their 2015 holiday sales announcement, Amazon stated that its devices saw a 2x sales gain over the previous year. Even if we don’t look at exact numbers, the jump from a 2x growth to 9x growth is nothing to scoff at. In November, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) estimated that Amazon has sold 5.1 million Echo devices in the US. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) has estimated that Amazon has sold 5.1 million Echo devices in the US.
Because the sales were so strong with the Echo, Amazon sold out about a week before Christmas.
According to Amazon, they saw a rise in mobile shopping this holiday season, although the gain was more muted than the big increases mentioned above. The company said that over 72 percent of their customers worldwide shopped on a mobile devices this year. Last year, Amazon said almost 70 percent of its customers did the same.
Regarding AmazonBasics the company didn’t release any specific sales figures for its own brands, but they do appear several times in Amazon’s category-by-category list of holiday best sellers:
- Audio & Accessories: the AmazonBasics 6-Outlet Surge Protector Power Strip was the No. 2 selling product.
- Camera: the AmazonBasics 60-Inch Lightweight Tripod with Bag was the No. 2 best seller.
- Home & Personal Care: the top seller was AmazonBasics AA Performance Alkaline Batteries (48-pack).
- PC: AmazonBasics Mini DisplayPort (Thunderbolt) to HDMI Adapter was the No. 3 selling product.
- Wireless: AmazonBasics Apple Certified Lightning to USB Cable (6 Feet) was the top-selling product.
Amazon ended up not sharing very much in regards to Prime, surprisingly. According to Amazon, there is more than one billion items that has been shipped worldwide via Prime and Fulfillment by Amazon. They gave a vague statement that “more people around the world tried Prime this holiday season than any previous year.” Amazon even shared a number of date-based milestones related to their Prime Now deliver service.