Cyber Monday was good to Amazon in 2015, the online retailer has just reported. Sales jumped an impressive 40 percent over last year's purchases on the post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping day, as a whopping 23 million items were ordered on Cyber Monday.
The numbers support indications that consumers are growing more and more comfortable with the online shopping experience each year. A recent report indicated that while purchases this holiday season grew by a healthy 7.9 percent, online sales jumped by a much greater amount, 20 percent.
Cyber Monday is the biggest online shopping day of the year, bigger than Black Friday, and many retailers pumped up the bargains this year in order to score a piece of the huge shopping pie. Target's website almost crashed on the day, when customers mobbed the site in order to take advantage of an unprecedented Cyber Monday deal the site was offering — a blanket 15 percent off of practically every item on the store's website, including both full-price items and others that were already on sale.
Most retailers, however, don't promote their Cyber Monday deals as much as they do those for Black Friday. That's because of a simple timing issue — stores only have the weekend in between the two days to advertise and get the word out, whereas they have weeks prior to Black Friday to promote upcoming bargains. That helps Amazon, which, as a non-traditional retailer, acts as more of a default destination-shopping site for many consumers on Cyber Monday, score a bigger piece of the pie.
Amazon was also helped along on Cyber Monday by its heavy promotion of its $99 Prime two-day free shipping service, which gained three million new members over the holiday season. How many of those customers will actually remain with Prime after the one-month free trial of the service expires remains to be seen.
Company spokesman Peter Faricy, VP for Amazon Marketplace, touted the continued growth of the company's "Fulfillment By Amazon" program, which packs and ships items for outside sellers and includes them in the Prime program.
"2015 was a big year for sellers on Amazon. In fact, sellers added more new selection and shipped more items than in any previous year," Faricy said.
In addition, Amazon also sold double the amount of company-branded devices, which include the Fire TV and Fire TV Stick streamers, during the 2015 holiday season than it did during the same period in 2014.
