Amazon.com Reporting This Holiday Season Their "Best Ever" 314
In a refreshing break from all the doom and gloom, Amazon.com is calling this holiday season their best ever. Reporting a 44 percent rise in the number of items sold, they are refusing to provide actual dollar amounts, so it is still a very subjective measurement. "Amazon customers ordered more than 6.3 million items on Dec. 15, compared with roughly 5.4 million on its peak day last year, the company said. It shipped more than 5.6 million products on its best day, a 44 percent rise over 2007, when it shipped about 3.9 million on its busiest day. The company did not provide dollar figures and wouldn't say whether the average value of orders had changed, and the jumps it reported Friday are in line with increases Amazon has seen since it started releasing the figures in 2002."
Re:"Our smallest loss ever!" (Score:5, Informative)
Pointless to respond to an AC, but Amazon has been continuously profitable since 2003.
Re:Begs the question - not so much (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One of my favorite places... (Score:3, Informative)
They say that just to be on the safe side. Everything I order from them arrives before the *beginning* of the predicted arrival period. So if they say "estimated delivery in 2 or 3 weeks", it arrives in one. Or earlier. I've had orders arrive in a mere 2 working days (ordered sunday, shipped monday and was here wednesday morning).
I usually order from their UK department from another country in europe, but I've ordered from the US in the past. The only time an order ever arrived past their estimated delivery period (it was coming from the US) they refunded me. If they're going to do that, it makes sense from a business standpoint to have broad estimated delivery periods.
Re:Amazon's real skill: hooking the media... (Score:5, Informative)
Not only did everything I ordered from Amazon get there on time. But when the things my folks ordered for me got returned as undeliverable because the moron of a substitute postman covering their route didn't feel like getting out of his toy car during a rain storm and didn't think to just hold them at the post office; Amazon not only reshipped a new order with a 24 hour turn around and bumped it up to 1st day delivery via UPS, all for free. (Man that's a run on sentence from hell.)
Re:One of my favorite places... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"Our smallest loss ever!" (Score:4, Informative)
Let me help you there, chucky:
2007: 476 million
2006: 190 million
2005: 359 million
2004: 588 million
2003: 35 million
2002: -149 million
Really, is this shocking information? That Amazon is profitable?
Unrealistic Expectation (Score:3, Informative)
If 4% growth in a mature company isn't good enough, then you need to recalibrate your expectations. The big gains in growth and stock price are just after a start-up and IPO. No business can grow at high rates forever, eventually the market for their product/service is saturated.
Re:Amazon's real skill: hooking the media... (Score:3, Informative)
But the numbers do little to tell us how good (or bad) Amazon's season really was. The company didn't disclose whether shoppers bought more or fewer high-priced items than in previous years or whether discounts ate into profit margins. It didn't disclose revenue or even the total volume of products it shipped throughout the holiday season.
What's more, as consumers do more and more of their shopping online, where Amazon is the leading retailer, a "record" season at Amazon is hardly surprising. Amazon has claimed that its holidays were the "best ever" or "busiest ever" every year since at least 2002.
Re:Online is the only way to shop these days (Score:3, Informative)
ACE: 4-40 nuts and bolts
Lowes: FAIL
ACE: Individual metric taps
Lowes: FAIL
ACE: Chrome plated decorative nuts and bolts
Lowes: FAIL
The list is long...
I'm no fan of ACE, but the big boxes really are very limited in each department. they look like they have a lot because they have a ton of departments.
Sheldon
Re:"Our smallest loss ever!" (Score:3, Informative)
10-15% is considered good net profit.
Depends on the industry. Walmart in '07 made 12.7 billion on 378.8 billion of revenue. That's almost exactly the same margin.
Amazon is very up-front with investors that they use cash-flow per share as their main metric rather than earnings per share.
Re:it's in the sales tax (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Amazon's shipping rocks (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One of my favorite places... (Score:3, Informative)
There are a few things that can make a huge difference...
First, stores, of any type, need a good location. Even when they are large chains, and can purchase the land and building outright, the property taxes are still much higher than Amazon's distribution centers. In addition, they need to build, heat and maintain a much larger number of stores/warehouses than Amazon. You can't build a single Home Depot to service a 5 state area - but Amazon can build a single warehouse, in the middle of nowhere, to service that area.
Second, a reduced number of employees. In a regular store you have people who have to worry about stocking and maintaining their areas; working the cash registers; and shifting products around to make the shelves "look good". At Amazon, the cash is handled by their servers, so no one needs to work the registers. They don't need to spend a lot of time straightening shelves, sweeping or other maintenance activities. Plus, they can gain by economy of scale and automate a lot of things.
Third, they probably save a ton in insurance compared to regular stores. Since customers don't walk through the doors, they don't have to carry billions in insurance to cover potential claims from someone who hurt themselves trying to take bricks off a shelf that's marked "Ask For Assistance Retrieving Items On This Shelf".
I'm sure there are many other reasons Amazon can have lower prices, even after factoring in free shipping, but these are what I came up with off the top of my head.
Re:Money is tight (Score:3, Informative)
I agree... obviously some places are doing better than others, but I'm not buying what the media is selling. I keep reading about these DEEP price cuts everyone is offering... I keep hearing about them, but I never see them. I've seen places bundling a few extra things with core products (like printers and so forth with laptops), but I'd rather have the core item at a reduced price...
I've been monitoring several HDTVs that I'm interested in for the past few months... the prices range from $1200 to $1500 on the model that I'm most interested in... and while the stores trade places on who is offering the best deal, the best deal never got any better than that.
Even though I'm not in the market for electronics, I still peruse the ads... I'm just not seeing anything special. Even Black Friday was a pretty big let down. Then, when you expect even better sales... I was actually at a Dillard's the day after Christmas... they weren't even having an after Christmas sale.
So Amazon is reporting higher sales. I believe Best Buy is also reporting higher sales, so it's not an anomaly. Some stores did better, some worse... how is that different than any other year?