Amazon Grabs 29% of Online Orders Ahead of Christmas

Amazon reportedly saw its investment in faster delivery bear fruit just before Christmas.

In the two weeks leading up to the holiday, the tech giant garnered 29% of global volume of online orders, Bloomberg News reported Thursday (Jan. 4), citing data on 55 million orders from package-tracking app Route. That 29% was up from 21% during Thanksgiving week.

“It’s a pretty sharp shift in how consumers shop,” Michael Yamartino, Route’s chief executive officer, told Bloomberg. “The top priority in the days leading up to Christmas is on-time delivery, and when Amazon says it will take two days, it only takes two days. It’s a combination of speed and confidence.”

Amazon announced in July that it planned to double its number of same-day delivery centers, an expansion that will happen “in the coming years,” Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, wrote on the company’s blog.

“Across the top 60 largest U.S. metro areas, more than half of Prime member orders arrived the same or next day,” Herrington said. “So far this year, we’ve delivered more than 1.8 billion units to U.S. Prime members the same or next day — nearly four times what we delivered at those speeds by this point in 2019.”

Last year also brought the news that Amazon had apparently surpassed UPS to become the largest delivery business in the U.S.

The company delivered more packages to consumers in the U.S. than UPS in 2022 — and also has led FedEx since 2020, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing internal Amazon data and sources familiar with the matter.

By Thanksgiving, Amazon had delivered more than 4.8 billion packages in the U.S., with the company projecting that number would reach 5.9 billion by year’s end, up from 5.2 billion in 2022.

News of Amazon’s holiday accomplishment came the same day that Adobe reported that Americans spent a record $222.1 billion on online purchases during the holidays, a 4.9% over 2022’s shopping season.

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) use also reached a new record in 2023, with the installment payment method contributing to $16.6 billion in online spending, a 14% increase from 2022.