Update: Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, said that Cyber Monday was the biggest day ever for small businesses on Amazon — customers ordered nearly 140 million units from these sellers.
Original story: Amazon wants you to know that it sold a lot of stuff this weekend.
The tech giant announced today that it had its “best-ever holiday shopping weekend for devices, with millions of Amazon devices sold between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.”
Amazon made the exact same statement after the Thanksgiving weekend last year, so its first-party device sales have increased year-over-year, but it’s unclear by how much.
The Echo Dot, which was discounted to $29.99 (usually $49.99), was the best-selling product on Amazon globally this weekend, from any manufacturer in any category. It was also the best-selling device at Whole Foods, where Amazon opened up pop-up stores this holiday season — yes, Amazon is selling its products at the grocery store now.
The company noted that reaction to the new $129.99 Echo Spot was “incredibly positive”; the bedside device is already sold out for this holiday season.
Amazon also said it sold 2.7X as many Fire TV sticks (discounted to $24.99 from $39.99) compared to the same period last year; that’s about the same year-over-year sales growth the company noted last year for the streaming stick.
In 2015, Amazon said customers ordered more than 54 million items worldwide on Cyber Monday. In 2016, that number spiked to 64 million. It seems likely that the company surpassed those records this year, though Amazon didn’t provide a specific number this time.
Adobe Analytics reported that U.S. consumers spent $2.87 billion online on Thanksgiving, up 18.3 percent year over year. A record $5.03 billion was spent on Black Friday, up nearly 17 percent. And a record $6.59 billion was spent on Cyber Monday, up 16.8 percent.
Data from consumer insights tracker Hitwise shows Amazon accounting for 54.9 percent of total online transactions in the U.S. on Black Friday; Walmart was the next-highest with 8.8 percent. That means Amazon likely pulled in several billion dollars in sales this weekend.
Regardless of specific numbers, it’s clear that Amazon continues to get Alexa — the digital brain that powers many of its devices, including the Echo and new Fire TV stick — in more households.
Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimated that Amazon has sold 20 million Echo units since the device was first released in 2015 and that Amazon has a 73 percent U.S. market share of “home automation devices,” compared to 27 percent for Google and its Google Home device.
Juniper Research this month noted that more than 70 million U.S. households, representing 55 percent of all the nation’s homes, will have a smart speaker like an Amazon Echo or Google Home by 2022. Overall, Juniper expects global sales of 256 million smart speakers by 2022.
Another key takeaway from this weekend’s shopping extravaganza is that Americans are opting to shop more online versus going to physical stores; they are also increasingly becoming more comfortable with buying products on their smartphone. Amazon, which is expected to spend a record $7 billion on shipping costs this holiday season, reported that mobile app orders on Thursday spiked 50 percent compared to Thanksgiving Day 2016.
