Amazon Continues Leading the Holiday Season this Year

After Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, the Christmas holidays have been a record-setter for Amazon, signaling its decade-long expansion in the US.

Buoyed by the sales of millions of its gadgets, the top sellers as per Amazon this holiday season included the Echo Dot, Fire Stick, and Echo Show 5. The Alexa-enabled devices have been an instant hit for the past several years, helping Amazon capture the largest share of the voice-assistant market.

People bought stuff from third-party sellers using Amazon, and the third-parties sold way more products this year than they did last year, surpassing more than a billion items.

Among the most popular purchases were LOL Surprise Glitter Globe Doll Winter Disco Series with Glitter Hair, iRobot’s (IRBT) Roomba 675 vacuum, and, of course, the perennially popular Instant Pot 80 pressure cooker. Well, these were the popular items bought for humans.

Dogs weren’t left out from the holiday purchases as they enjoyed SmartSticks peanut butter chews, and cats were particularly into Temptation Classic cat treats this holiday season.

‘The Guardians’ by John Grisham was the most bought book during the holidays, and ‘Home Alone’ was the most searched holiday movie on Fire TV. And Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ has been the most played song on Amazon Music Stick since the Thanksgiving.

How everyone else fared?

People did shop elsewhere except Amazon and helped stores score bog off the last-minute shopping. Mastercard reported on December 28, 2019, that American retail sales rose by 3.4% this year, between November and Christmas Eve, compared to 2018. Online sales soared up to 18.8%, but only 1.2% for in-store purchases.

December 21, 2019, known as Super Saturday in the US, was the record best day ever, pulling a sales record of $34.4 billion, according to Customer Growth Partners report. This number totaled more than four times the sales from this year’s Cyber Monday.

Electronic appliances store won the holiday shopping season with 4.6% of soaring sales over last year (and 10.7% online), as per Mastercard. Specialty apparel was the online winner, soaring up to 17%, including jewelry, where the sales grew by 1.8% overall and 8.8% online.

Unfortunately, all was not merry during the holidays as department stores struggled. Sales fell by 1.8% overall, even if their online sales grew by 6.9%. Popular department stores such as Sears, JCPenney (JCP), Kohl’s (KSS), and Macy’s (M) have lost shoppers to big box stores such as Walmart and Target.

Tiffany’s have also struggled lately with their sales owing to the trade war with China, and their sales were up by 1–3% between November 1, 2019, and December 24, 2019, compared to 2018. Tiffany has been reporting constant losses owing to the war and protests going on in Hong Kong.