With up to half a million items delivered worldwide every day through the peak period, Amazon is claiming a record-breaking Christmas for sales in the UK.
Amazon.co.uk said on Wednesday it delivered up to 256 tonnes of goods on the busiest days of the Christmas period. The peak fell on 12 December when close to half a million items were delivered, with a Royal Mail truck leaving an Amazon depot every 12 minutes.
Worldwide, Amazon customers ordered up to 3.6 million items daily, or the equivalent to 41 items every second. More than 108 million orders were placed globally during the whole of the holiday season.
In its traditional bookselling business, Amazon's UK arm said its most popular title was the New Scientist book, Does Anything Eat Wasps And 101 Other Questions, which sold more than twice the number of copies sold by last year’s bestseller. Other top titles in the UK included Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? by Alan McArthur and one for those tired of turkey, Jamie’s Italy.
Unsurprisingly, digital music players led the way in electronics sales. Their popularity was also shown by the lines of queues at Apple's UK stores.
According to Hitwise, the Web analysis agency, download sites such as Apple's iTunes Music Store saw a 50 per cent rise in traffic between 24 and 25 December, 15 per cent higher than last Christmas, thanks to new iPod owners.
Weekly downloads now exceed 650,000 and may pass the one million mark for the first time this Christmas.
Retailer Comet reported a 294 percent surge in online traffic while Currys saw an increase of 279 per cent on Christmas Day, as eager shoppers checked out the winter sales prices.
Talkback
Yes it was a record - but it could have been a whole lot better had it not been for a catalogue of bad decisions and broken systems at the peak of the buying period.
Amazon's affiliate (associate) tracking systems broke in the UK during late November and may still be broken now. This caused a flurry of activity as the associates went about reconfiguring their links to a format more likely to track correctly. There has been minimal acknowledgement of this by Amazon - individuals have received e-mails acknowledging a problem, promising a fix and promising that associates reports would be updated in due course. But that was all some time ago - and no word in quite a while.
Also, Amazon chose to upgrade major systems used by their network of associates over the US Thanksgiving weekend. Something broke - but the US staff were on holiday. These errors cascaded through the whole Amazon Web Services system - all six 'locales' .com, .ca, .co.uk, .fr, .de and .co.jp appear to have been affected.
Amazon's automated communication filtering caused problems for associates experiencing problems.
The ongoing £7 'cap' on associates earnings for promoting UK electronics sales is undermining Amazon's marketing of this product category. There is growing descent in the 'associates central' forums with one or two of us pushing for an organised protest. Associates are annoyed that a sale of a high value item can receive commission as little as 1% instead of the more usual 5 to 10%.
Amazon investors therefore should take comfort that this xmas their earnings were better than in previous years, but they should not be complacent, sales could have been so much higher.