Amazon Announces Third-Party Selling Up 40% During Holiday Season

Amazon.com, Inc.

today announced that 2012 was a record-breaking holiday season for businesses selling on Amazon. The more than 2 million third-party sellers worldwide on Amazon experienced record holiday growth: unit growth solely from sellers in the U.S. increased more than 40 percent year-over-year. For the year, sellers on Amazon sold hundreds of millions of units worth tens of billions of dollars worldwide. “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 innovative fulfillment service – Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). 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 great customer service. Sellers using Amazon's numerous other ecommerce services also had a big holiday season. Whether it was the thousands of businesses using the highly scalable Amazon Webstore platform to run their shopping sites, the millions of Amazon customers who chose an Amazon Payments method as a simple and trusted way to pay for purchases on seller websites or the tens of millions of Product Ads clicks that drove Amazon traffic to seller stores, businesses using these connected Amazon offerings set records in sales volume, traffic and services performance. Sellers on Amazon Holiday Fun Facts: * Third-party sellers on Amazon.com shipped items from around the globe to customers in all 50 U.S. States and countries worldwide from Aruba to Zambia. * Amazon's third-party sellers sold enough Santa Hats for Santa to be able to wear a new hat every day for the next 137 years. * Amazon's third-party sellers sold enough smartphone and tablet screen protectors to cover the field of every NFL stadium, four times over. * Amazon's third-party sellers sold enough guitar picks to give one to every attendee of Woodstock. * Amazon's third-party sellers sold enough mustache pacifiers to give one to every baby born in Washington State next month. * Amazon's third-party sellers sold enough tea lights to keep a votive illuminated continuously for over 200 years.