Amazon Touts Alexa Device, Overall Holiday Sales

While it's never easy to figure out exactly what the numbers mean, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) typically releases stacks of them following big sales events. And there's no bigger sales event than the two-month end-of-the-year holiday season.

The company said, "Customers purchased and gifted a record-setting number of devices from the Amazon Echo family with sales up over 9x compared to last year’s holiday season and millions of Alexa devices sold worldwide this year." Tuesday's announcement doesn't say 9x what?

Amazon does say that its holiday season best-sellers were the Echo Dot ($49.99), the Fire TV Stick ($39.99), the Fire tablet (no model specified, but these range from $49.99 to $259.99), and Amazon Echo ($179.99).

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The best-selling toys and games were the Hasbro Pie Face Game & Pie Face Showdown Game, Scientific Explorer Mind Blowing Science Kit, Snap Circuits Jr. SC-100 Electronics Discovery Kit; and the best-selling wearables included the Garmin vivofit Fitness Band, Garmin vívoactive HR GPS Smart Watch, Samsung Gear VR - Virtual Reality Headset.

Amazon also shipped more than 1 billion items worldwide with its Prime and Fulfillment by Amazon programs and the company said that more people around the world tried Prime this holiday season than in any other previous year. And in what U.S. city were the most items ordered with the Amazon Prime Now service: Dallas, Texas. How many? Amazon didn't say.

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The company said it's biggest shopping day of the season worldwide was December 19, the last day the company guaranteed that standard shipping in the U.S. would reach its destination by December 23.

More than 72% of Amazon's customers around the world used a mobile device to shop and shopping on the company's own mobile app grew 56% worldwide this year.

Impressive, no question. Still, it would be nice to see some actual numbers.

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