Consumers are (mostly) done with holiday shopping, and Amazon seems to have had a great season.
Actually, Amazon had its “best-ever season” of shopping, the e-commerce giant said yesterday. The company shipped more than a billion items worldwide through Amazon Prime and Fulfillment by Amazon, with company’s own digital assistant — Amazon Echo — being a top seller.
What’s (possibly) even more interesting is that a vast majority of customers, 72%, shopped on Amazon through mobile devices.
Moreover, shopping on the free Amazon mobile app increased by 56% worldwide this holiday season. Amazon did not provide the amount or the number of payments processed through the holidays. The numbers may come of little surprise, considering the record-breaking mobile revenue this past Black Friday, which topped $1.2 billion overall, a 33% growth compared to last year, according to data from Adobe Systems Inc.
Those numbers, however, further prove Amazon’s theory that all we ever need for shopping is our smartphones and the right app. That’s also what the entire Amazon Go store concept is based on: customers check in with their apps at the door, then fill their shopping bags and leave.
Amazon also sold a record number of devices from its Amazon Echo family, with “sales up over 9x compared to last year’s holiday season,” the company said. Echo is largely out of stock these days.
Echo’s voice activated virtual assistant, Alexa, is increasingly developing new skills, but in fintech world it seems that Capital One is still the only one to adopt Amazon’s voice tech.