The online retailer said on Tuesday that more than 400,000 items were dispatched in one day, although a spokeswoman declined to reveal the date in question.
Amazon UK's overall sales during the pre-Christmas period were also the highest since its launch in 1998, according to the company.
Amazon.com also reported a record Christmas, with orders of over 2.8 million units logged on its busiest day.
The most popular software item over the Christmas period was a bundled package of Symantec's antivirus software, Norton Internet Security 2005, with its disk recovery software, Norton Ghost 9.0.
Second on the list was the Student and Teacher Edition of Microsoft Office 2003. Amazon sells this product for £89.99, more than £200 less than the cost of the Standard Edition of Microsoft Office 2003, which did not make it into the top 10. The Student and Teacher Edition is only licensed for non-commercial, educational use and can only be purchased by students, parents, guardians or teachers who meet certain criteria.
However, it appears that neither Microsoft nor Amazon actually verifies the details of customers buying this product.
A Microsoft spokeswoman said it does not ask for proof that the purchaser of the software qualifies for the discount, but that the retailer may ask for proof. The Amazon UK spokeswoman said it does not ask for proof of qualification, but provides information on the product so that people can see if they qualify for it.
Amazon.com was hit by outages during December, but the Amazon UK spokeswoman said the UK site had not been affected.
Talkback
maybe that accounts for why none of the 5 orders I placed for xmas were despatched (let alone delivered) to the dates Amazon stated in the orders !!! I cancelled one order and am still waiting for 2 others. Bit of a let-down year for online shopping.
Similarly, my items still hadn't been despatched after my expected delivery date. I emailed their customer services. My Items were found to have been "delayed" in the warehouse. In the end they were delivered in time for Christmas.
Fair enough if they were the busiest ever, but sufficient resources should have been planned for, rather than take risks with peoples Christmas at an already stressful time of year.
I wonder if Amazon would have been so busy if users understood how their account detials can be viewed by other users of the same machine - a serious breach of security for users placing orders in internet cafes.
Amazon have been advised of the problem but they are still refusing to acknowledge it as an issue.
The glitch allows the next visitor to the amazon site to view the secure account details of the prior user without needing to enter a password!!!
Using this data a new password can be requested, once in possession of this a new user can place orders to the account of the prior user without their knowledge.
I will keep trying to get Amazon to acknowledge the issue - but in the mean time if you want to protect your details make sure you disable 'one-click' ordering.