If you’re worn out from all your holiday shopping lately, perhaps you can take a minute or so to recoup by learning about everything else that everyone picked up. Online retail giant Amazon just released a number of facts about the shopping trends of its customers this year—leading off, of course, with the fact that more than 10 million new Prime customers used its service over the holidays for the very first time.
Amazon stuck with its mystery theme for this year’s holiday sales performance review, saying things like “record-breaking” and “record growth” without really talking about actual solid numbers or dollars. The company did reveal some stats that, even surrounded by an obscuring fog of relative terms, are worth paying attention to. The company signed up over 10 million new Amazon Prime members (and 10+ million is an actual, quantifiable number) and the ecommerce giant saw almost 60 percent of shopper activity come from mobile platforms, including its native apps and mobile websites. Last year, Amazon reported that more than half of its customers were using mobile devices to shop, so there’s relatively little change with this year’s total only ‘approaching’ 60 percent. Still, both represent a huge change from prior holiday shopping seasons, indicating that transactions on mobile devices is becoming the default option, and that this isn’t just a fleeting fad or freak occurrence.
