Amazon touts holiday season growth

SEATTLE — Amazon contends that 2012 was a record-breaking holiday season for businesses selling on its popular online Webstore platform.



Amazon reports that more than two million third-party sellers worldwide experienced record holiday growth, and unit growth solely from sellers in the U.S. increased more than 40% year-over-year. For the year, sellers on Amazon sold hundreds of millions of units worth tens of billions of dollars worldwide, according to the company, which did not provide an actual sales figure.



Online measurement firm comScore Media Metrix’s top 50 Web properties report for November 2012 showed that 6th ranked Amazon.com had 116 million unique visitors in November 2012 compared with 112.8 million last year. It’s reasonable to conclude that the online retailer stands to have another record-breaking year in 2013.



“We value the breadth and depth of selection that businesses selling on Amazon offer our more than 188 million active customers worldwide,” said Peter Faricy, VP for Amazon Marketplace. “The entire Amazon Seller organization is focused on helping third-party businesses succeed and grow on Amazon. We do this by creating a dynamic marketplace platform that helps every seller deliver the best possible selection, service and prices to all Amazon customers.”



Sellers around the world continued the rapid adoption of Amazon’s fulfillment service, Fulfillment by Amazon. With FBA, sellers of all sizes can choose to have Amazon ship their products directly to customers and offer Amazon Prime benefits, Free Super Saver Shipping, simple exporting to customers around the world, easy returns for orders placed on Amazon.com and customer service.



Amazon also reported that sellers using its other e-commerce services had a big holiday season, as well, setting records in sales volume, traffic and services performance.