4 Million in One Week

Amazon Signs Up 4 Million Prime Members in One Week, Echo Dot Is Top-Selling Product Over Holidays

By Todd Spangler  @xpangler Todd Spangler


CREDIT: COURTESY OF AMAZON

Amazon disgorged a laundry list of factoids touting 2017 as its biggest holiday-shopping season ever. But while impressive sounding, the stats lacked the specificity and context — as is typical for Amazon — to determine just how massive the ecommerce company’s haul was.


One eye-catching figure: More than 4 million people signed up for Prime free trials or began paid memberships in a one-week period, according to Amazon.

However, the company has never announced how many Prime members it has; as of September 2017, Amazon Prime had about 90 million U.S. members (up 38% from a year earlier), according to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Prime, which costs $99 per year in the U.S., offers free shipping on millions of items, as well as access to Prime Video and Prime Music and other perks.

Amazon also said the $30 Echo Dot was the No. 1 best-selling product over the 2017 holiday season from any manufacturer out of the millions of items available in its online store — but didn’t say how many were sold. The Echo Dot led the sales of “tens of millions” of Alexa-enabled devices worldwide, according to the company, which said Echo Dot, Echo Spot, and Echo Buttons sold out this holiday season.

Amazon’s Fire TV Stick was the top-selling line of streaming-media players in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan on the site, with the site selling twice as many Fire TV Sticks this year vs. last year’s holiday season. Note that Amazon only resumed selling Apple TV devices last week after a two-year hiatus — and the Apple TV 4K set-tops sold out within hours.

Other stats from Amazon’s announcement:

• On Prime Video, the most-watched TV season over the holidays was Amy Sherman-Palladino’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and the most-watched series overall was “The Grand Tour” (both Amazon Studios originals). The most-watched Amazon original movie was “The Big Sick” starring Kumail Nanjiani, who co-wrote the script with his wife, Emily V. Gordon.
• The most-purchased movie over the holidays was “Elf,” and the top-selling TV series was “The Walking Dead.”
• The most-watched Amazon Channel subscriptions over the 2017 holiday season were HBO, Showtime and Starz, and the current seasons of “Game of Thrones,” “Shameless” and “Power” were the top watched shows on each channel, respectively.
• Amazon’s peak day of customer fulfillment in 2017 was Dec. 19. In the U.S., the company used more than 6,000 trailers and 32 Amazon Air planes to deliver orders.
• More than 1 billion items were ordered from small businesses and entrepreneurs worldwide this season, with more than 140 million of those over the five-day period from Thanksgiving (Nov. 23) through Cyber Monday (Nov. 27).