Amazon's 'Record-Setting' Holiday Season: Which Numbers Are Worth Paying Attention To
Like eggnog, mistletoe and Rudolph, lengthy Amazon (AMZN) press releases extolling how popular the e-commerce giant's goods and services were between Thanksgiving and Christmas have become a staple of the holiday season. And in line with the spirit of the season, the announcements mix a fair amount of hype and theatrics with items their intended audience -- Amazon investors, merchants and business partners -- should genuinely be impressed by.
Altogether, Amazon's 2016 holiday press release contains over 100 bullet points sharing "fun facts" about its seasonal performance. Some are clearly fluff meant to inform/remind readers that a particular Amazon service exists, or to drive home the scale of Amazon's operations -- for example, noting that Home Alone and Elf were the holiday movies most frequently requested via the Alexa voice assistant, or that customers "purchased the weight of a grizzly bear in gold."
And others, such as lists of holiday bestsellers for three dozen categories, seem meant to inform merchants about what's in demand and remind everyone about the breadth of Amazon's retail offerings.
But in between all of this, Amazon also includes a number of points highlighting how much Amazon's operations and customer base have grown in recent years. Some of these are more impressive than others.
Here's a run-down of the most noteworthy holiday season sales, subscription and usage figures included in this year's press release, and just how meaningful each datapoint is.
1. "Millions" of Alexa devices were sold.
Ultimately, this isn't very surprising. Amazon discounted its Alexa-powered Echo and Fire TV devices during the holiday season, and research firm CIRP estimated in November Amazon sold 2 million Echo units alone during the first 9 months of 2016. As usual, Amazon declines to provide specific hardware sales data.
2. Echo sales were up over 9x relative to last year's holiday season.
This is more impressive, and shows how the early-2016 launches of the less costly Echo Dot and Tap speakers/voice assistants have expanded the Echo line's addressable market. Amazon's figure is backed up by the fact the iOS Alexa app made it to #4 on the App Store's free download chart on Christmas Day. Once again, though, a precise sales figure would be nice.
3. Over one billion items were shipped worldwide via Prime and Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).
This is impressive on a standalone basis, and it's worth noting that Amazon didn't provide a similar number in last year's holiday press release. Prime and FBA have both seen tremendous growth over the last few years, and there's a lot of evidence showing both that Prime members spend much more on Amazon than other customers, and that many merchants are adopting FBA to make their goods Prime-eligible. But in the absence of data about the average selling price of Prime/FBA-shipped goods and their share of total Amazon shipments, this stat doesn't tell us much about whether a company expected to do fourth-quarter sales of $44.7 billion will meet its numbers.
4. More people tried Prime this holiday season than in any previous year.
No surprise, given Prime is still clearly seeing robust growth. Citing survey data, Cowen estimated that the number of U.S. Prime subscribers grew by 23% annually in October to 49.5 million; the launch of a monthly payment option in April may have helped. Amazon still isn't providing data on the overall number of Prime subscribers it has, however.
No comments:
Post a Comment