Amazon’s Record-Breaking 2015 Holiday Season

Amazon’s stock jumped 3 per cent Tuesday to a record close of $693.97, though it dropped yesterday to end down 0.7 per cent.

Its shares are up 123 per cent this year as investors have been heartened by rising profits thanks to its AWS cloud business and impressive Amazon Prime numbers.

Amazon has seen a record-breaking holiday season with three million customers signing up for Amazon Prime along with a significant shift towards mobile shopping for top selling technology including smart TV’s and Amazon Fire tablets.

Three million sign up for Amazon Prime
According to Amazon, three million customers signed up for its $99-per-year Prime subscription service in the week before Christmas.

Amazon does not actually say how many Prime members they have globally, only stating that there are “tens of millions of members worldwide.”

Prime subscribers receive free shipping and during this holiday season, which Amazon defines as November 1 to December 19, more than 200 million items benefited from free shipping.

Amazon Prime members also took advantage of super fast two-hour delivery via Prime Now, with Christmas Eve accounting for the busiest day ever for Prime Now.

“This was another great holiday season to be a Prime member, and we welcomed three million new members in the third week of December alone, over 200 million more items shipped for free with Prime this holiday, and members doubled their viewing hours of Prime Video compared to last year with the Amazon Original Series The Man in the High Castle leading the way as the most watched TV season ever on Prime Video.” Jeff Bezos

Mobile shopping increases to 70 percent
Amazon’s data has shown that nearly 70 percent of customers used their mobile devices to shop on Amazon.com during the holiday season while the number of U.S.-based Prime members shopping on mobile more than doubled compared to 2014.

During Cyber Monday, the company processed more than 33 electronics purchases per second from mobile devices worldwide.

Betting big on Prime
Analysts at Piper Jaffray said the latest figures indicate that Prime’s growth is not slowing despite larger numbers, with items shipped, Prime content use and membership continues to grow at impressive speeds.

Amazon is betting big on its Prime initiatives, investing heavily in transportation and logistics technology as it pushes to disrupt door-to-door and same-day deliveries and triggers so-called “delivery wars” with other retailers.

As reported earlier, Amazon is also buying its own trucks, hiring delivery workers, building secretive hubs across US cities, and possibly starting an air cargo operation as it aims to entice the instant gratification shopper with one-hour delivery.

Amazon is also waiting for regulatory approval to use “Prime Air” delivery drones, which it said will one day “be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road”.

Amazon to go head-to-head with U.K. supermarkets
Amazon confirmed that it will add thousands of extra goods to its UK-focused Amazon Pantry service, which allows customers to buy from a range of 4,000 grocery and household products, including brands such as Kellogg’s, Ariel, Colgate, Walkers, Uncle Ben’s and Kronenbourg.

It is another blow for Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, which are already under fierce pressure from Aldi and Lidl. The German discounters have eaten into the ‘Big Four’s’ market share and profits and forced them to slash grocery prices.

Christopher North, head of Amazon UK, told the Guardian in an interview: ‘We are really happy with the early numbers. In the new year we are going to be adding a lot more products.’

Related: Is Amazon About to Disrupt Another Billion-Dollar Market – Third Party Logistics?