BLOOMBERG - Amazon.com, the world's largest internet retailer, rose as much as 4.9 per cent in Nasdaq trading after saying it had its best-ever holiday sales even as overall online spending at US retailers dipped.
More than 6.3 million items were ordered worldwide on December 15th, its peak day, the Seattle-based company said in a statement. Spokeswoman Sally Fouts declined to provide specific revenue or profit data.
"People like Amazon have set a very, very high bar," Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst at Jupiter Research in New York, said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio.
She said Amazon.com's breadth of offering, quality of product reviews and "incredibly good" on-time deliveries attracted consumers to the site.
Online spending at US retailers declined 1 per cent in the holiday season through December 19th, research firm ComScore said last week, less than the 19 per cent gain seen during the 2007 holiday season.
Inclement weather during the second half of December may have caused more people to buy over the internet instead of driving to the mall, SpendingPulse said yesterday.
Excluding fuel, total sales may have dropped 4 per cent during the holidays, SpendingPulse said.
More than 5.6 million items were shipped on Amazon.com's peak day and 99 per cent of goods arrived in time to meet holiday deadlines, it said. Top-selling items included Samsung Electronics televisions, Nintendo's Wii, Apple's IPod touch, JK Rowlings's The Tales of Beedle the Bard and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books.
Amazon.com rose 93 cents, or 1.8 per cent, to $52.37 at 11:56am in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading, after earlier reaching $53.95. The shares fell 45 per cent this year before yesterday.
