Amazon’s holiday season victory lap continues, Prime ships 5 billion packages

The Tweeter in Chief’s opprobrium notwithstanding, Amazon.com continues its victory lap after completing – with no major disruptions or delays – a record-breaking holiday shopping season that saw the Seattle-based retailer ship more than 5 billion items via its Prime membership service in 2017.

That’s a massive uptick from the 1 billion items that Amazon.com said it shipped worldwide via Prime during the 2016 holiday season.

The company added that there are roughly 100 million items eligible for expedited, free shipping through the Prime service. External researchers estimate that Amazon currently could have up to 90 million Prime members.

U.S. membership continues to grow, but analysts said they see growth rates slowing, as the market becomes saturated. In response, Amazon.com has invested heavily in other markets such as the U.K. and E.U. in search of new members.

Amazon.com’s recent launch of its “Amazon Global Store” via its recently acquired UAE-based Souq.com, offering customers in the UAE the ability to shop for more than 1 million products from Amazon.com in the United States, is another example of its global efforts.

Amazon.com’s successful holiday season is all the more notable, considering that pilots flying for it’s Prime Air service had warned that, ”years of substandard pay and working conditions have led many veteran pilots to leave these airlines for better jobs, creating serious problems for these companies as they ramp up their business with Amazon.”

However, according to the e-tailing giant, no evidence of such a labor shortage had been reported.