Amazon enjoys best ever season as orders surge

Seattle: Online retailer Amazon.com Inc called this holiday season its 'best ever,' saying on Friday that it saw a 17 per cent increase in orders on its busiest day - a rare piece of good news in a season that has been far from merry for most retailers, including online businesses.

Amazon customers ordered more than 6.3 million items on December 15, compared with roughly 5.4 million on its peak day last year, the company said. It shipped more than 5.6 million products on its best day, a 44 per cent surge over 2007, when it shipped about 3.9 million on its busiest day.

Amazon's best-sellers included the Nintendo Wii game console, Samsung's 52-inch LCD HDTV and Apple Inc's iPod touch.

Analysts agreed Amazon's report was good news for the online shopping giant, but they were divided over whether the results indicate strength in online commerce in general.

Shopping budgets

Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru said Amazon's experience shows the current economy is favouring discount retailers, both online and offline.

"The Amazon story does not surprise me because Amazon has always traditionally been a leader on price, and they're one of the first places consumers go when they're looking for things online," Mulpuru said. "In many ways they're like the Wal-Mart of the online world."

Holiday sales typically account for 30 per cent to 50 per cent of a retailer's annual total, but rising unemployment, home foreclosures, the stock market decline and other economic worries led many shoppers to slash their shopping budgets this year. SpendingPulse - a division of MasterCard Advisors - said its preliminary data show that online sales fell 2.3 per cent compared with the 2007 holiday season, while retail sales overall fell 5.5 per cent to 8 per cent, including sales of cars and gasoline. The decline was 2 per cent to 4 per cent when auto and gas sales are excluded.

Online shopping may have gotten a boost from winter storms during the last two weeks before Christmas, which made travel to brick-and-mortar stores more difficult.

Although Amazon's orders rose, the company didn't say whether orders were, on average, worth more or less than last year. Spokeswoman Sally Fouts said the company would release revenue results in its fourth-quarter earnings report, due in a month.

But she said this was Amazon's "best season ever". Orders to Amazon on the peak day of its holiday season have jumped in the double-digit percentage range for at least the past five years, according to data released by the company.