A merry e-Christmas

With e-commerce becoming an ever more important driver of air freight demand, we thought it fitting to close 2016 with a look at the Christmas season through the eyes of the world’s original e-tailer.

According to a note just published by Amazon, the 2016 holiday season was its best-ever. Topping the list of best-sellers were the company’s own electronic must-have gadgets, including Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick, Fire tablet, and Amazon Echo. Of course, millions – many, many, many millions – of orders for other items were placed and delivered. Here are a few fun facts about those orders…

• More than one billion items shipped worldwide with Amazon Prime and Fulfillment by Amazon this holiday season.

• Amazon.com customers purchased enough 4K TVs to reach the peak of Mount Everest more than 9 times.

• December 23, 2016 was the biggest day ever for Prime Now deliveries worldwide and members ordered 3 times more items compared to last year with one and two hour delivery worldwide. Echo Dot, Amazon Echo, Fire TV Stick and Oreo Cookies were some of the most popular items ordered that day in the US.

• December 19 was the peak worldwide shipping day this holiday season.

• Amazon fulfillment centers in San Marcos, Texas and Kent, Washington, as well as two Polish fulfillment centers, in Poznan and Wroclaw, shipped more than one million items in a single day.

• The fastest Prime Now delivery on Christmas Eve took 13 minutes and was delivered at 9:05 p.m. to a Prime member in Redondo Beach, California.

• More than 72 percent of Amazon customers worldwide shopped using a mobile device this holiday.

• Shopping on the free Amazon mobile app grew by 56 percent this holiday, worldwide.

And, of course, billions of online purchases means millions of returns, so air and road freight providers get a sort of post-Christmas bonus. UPS, for example, says that this year’s record e-commerce sales are driving another record that will jump-start the New Year. National Returns Day, (5 January) is when UPS will ship the most returns packages back to retailers. The company says it expects to return 1.3 million packages on that day alone.