On the heels of record holiday sales over the Black Friday through Cyber Monday timeframe, Amazon announced this morning that Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day worldwide in company history. The company earlier this week noted it had sold record numbers of Amazon devices on Cyber Monday, but made no claims about the size of the event in terms of sales.
This morning, however, that changed.
Amazon now says that Cyber Monday 2017 was bigger than any other shopping day, including the sales holiday it invented called Prime Day. Held during the typically slower summertime shopping season, Prime Day 2017 was the biggest sales day in company history, before now, and it was the biggest shopping day the year prior.
As per usual, Amazon didn’t release sales figures for Cyber Monday, only saying that customers ordered “hundreds of millions” of products from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, with 140 million items bought from small businesses.
The retailer also noted an uptick in mobile shopping, saying that orders from the Amazon App on Cyber Monday 2017 had increased more than 50 percent worldwide, compared to last year.
That correlates to the other online shopping trends reported by Adobe, which found a similar increase in mobile shopping this year. On Black Friday, Adobe reported smartphones accounted for 44.6 percent of visits and 26 percent of revenue for online retailers, working out to just under $2 billion in sales. On Cyber Monday, purchases made on smartphones broke records with $2 billion in sales.
Amazon’s announcement follows prior reports that the retailer may have accounted for half of Black Friday online sales, according to one analyst firm’s estimate, indicating the size and scale of its e-commerce operations.
The retailer had also heavily pushed its own products on Cyber Monday, offering deep discounts, which could have encouraged more sales.
Amazon said it sold “millions” of its devices over the holiday shopping weekend, noting that there are now “tens of millions” of Alexa-powered devices now in customers’ hands. (That figure is sales to date, though, not due to Cyber Monday deals. It was previously announced during Amazon’s Q3 earnings.)
Amazon’s Echo Dot and Amazon Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote became not only the best-selling Amazon devices over the long holiday shopping weekend, but also the best-selling products from any manufacturer in any category on Amazon.
The Echo Dot, specifically, was the best seller on Cyber Monday, Amazon added today.
“Amazon customers shopped at record levels during the Turkey 5, ordering hundreds of millions of products from toys to fashion to electronics and Amazon devices,” stated Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer, in a statement about the record sales. “Customers ordered nearly 140 million items from small businesses alone and this is just the beginning of the holiday season. We’ll continue to offer incredible deals and a vast selection of unique products, with fast and free shipping options all season long, and every day.”