Santa brought Amazon another record-breaking season.
In addition to its record-breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, the start of the holiday shopping season, the e-commerce giant said it sold more products throughout the holidays this year than ever before.
“This season was our best yet, and we look forward to continuing to bring our customers what they want, in ways most convenient for them in 2019,” Jeff Wilke, chief executive officer of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Fashion was no exception.
Some of the top-selling brands in the U.S. this Christmas included Calvin Klein, Columbia Sportswear and Ugg. Men’s wear was also a top seller among the company’s own brands, like Amazon Essentials and Goodthreads, and labels like Carhartt.
Carhartt, the apparel company known for its work clothes, sold more than one million products on Amazon this year.
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Ath-leisure continues to reign as a champion. Brands like Nike, Adidas, Alo Yoga and Champion were some of shoppers’ favorites, along with items like the Skinny Jeggings by Daily Ritual.
In the U.S. alone, more than one billion items were shipped by way of Amazon Prime, the company’s members-only service, this year. And shipping, which includes one-day, same-day and two-hour shipping, continued until 11:30 p.m. Pacific Time on Christmas Eve.
Whether the company has profited from the increased shipments and updated services is unclear. Some retail experts say the extra shipping costs have cut into margins at retailers across the board. Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped about its profits ahead of earnings.
In a statement, Amazon said small- and medium-sized businesses benefited the most from the holiday rush, with more than 50 percent of items sold in Amazon stores coming from that sector.
Meanwhile, this year’s holiday shopping season, both in-store and online, was one of the best in more than five years. Retails sales were up 5.1 percent year-over-year, according to a report by Mastercard, compared with previous forecasts of 4 to 5 percent.
The day after Christmas was also a good day on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rallying more than 1,000 points to close at 22,878.45. The nearly 5 percent surge, the index’s biggest single-day gain in history, comes at the end of a particularly volatile year in the markets. One that includes a brutal Christmas Eve sell-off where the index shed roughly 400 points, marking one of the worst trading days since the financial crisis of 2008 and hovering on the edge of a bear market.
But Wednesday’s session was a good one, with all three major indices, including the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite rising and retail stocks coming in as some of the top performers. The SPDR S&P Retail index rose 5.75 percent to $40.66.
Shares of American Eagle Outfitters Inc. and Kohl’s Corp. jumped 10.69 percent and 10.25 percent, respectively, while Amazon closed 9.45 percent higher to $1,470.90. Nike Inc. and Lululemon Athletica Inc.’s shares also closed higher.