Recently retailer said on Tuesday US time that it sold “tens of millions” of devices bearing the Alexa voice-activated digital assistant during the peak shopping season. That lineup includes Amazon’s Echo speakers and Fire TV streaming device, among other gizmos.
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Amazon Solds Ten Millions Of Echo & Alexa Devices
The Alexa sales range was among a barrage of factoids Amazon released on its activities during the holiday shopping frenzy. The disclosures lean toward the self-promotional and the trivial (“An Amazon Air cargo plane can hold more than 10,000 Instant Pots” and “Millions of customers in the US watched deals with Watch a Deal”), but include some limited data points that retail analysts will pick apart for hints at the health of Amazon’s business.
Among the more useful set:
- During a single, unspecified week, 4 million people signed up for paid or trial Amazon Prime memberships. Analysts say subscribers of Amazon’s membership program, which costs $US99 ($130) a year in the US, likely spend more on the retail site than non-members.
- More than 1 billion items were ordered from the legions of independent sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace. Such sellers in recent quarters have accounted for half of the products purchased on Amazon.com.
- Among Amazon’s expanding fleet of warehouses, 10 facilities managed to pack and ship more than one million packages in a single day, an emerging benchmark for Amazon’s increasingly automated depots.
- Use of Amazon’s mobile shopping app worldwide was up 70 percent.
