In what is becoming its own holiday tradition, Amazon sent out a press release this week explaining how Amazon and Amazon devices in particular crushed it this past Cyber Monday.
In Amazon’s typical vague fashion, the company didn’t release any hard numbers, saying only that “Customers purchased millions more Amazon Devices compared to the same period last year in Amazon’s Stores globally and the best-selling items were Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote.”
It’s no real surprise that the biggest e-commerce site in the world could pull levers and buttons on its biggest shopping day of the year to generate millions of sales of its own products. But if we look back, during last year’s Cyber Monday holiday weekend, Echo Dot was also a big seller, with millions of Echo devices sold. And in 2017, Amazon said that over that entire holiday shopping season that it had sold tens of millions of Alexa devices.
In short, dominance perpetuates itself, and with Amazon owning 70 percent of the smart speaker market, its dominance doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. For the smart kitchen, this means appliance makers will continue to bake Alexa capabilities into their devices, which will beget more sales of Alexa-enabled devices, and the cycle continues.
Quick sidenote: It’s interesting to see Amazon’s wording evolve over the past three years. In 2017 it was “Alexa” enabled devices. In 2018 they were “Echo” devices and this year they are “Amazon” devices. This evolution is a reflection of how Amazon has broadened its first-party offerings with items like the Fire TV devices and Ring connected doorbells and lights.
But it wasn’t all Amazon, Amazon, Amazon this holiday season. The company also announced its “Best of Prime 2019” this week and among the winners were Instant Pot and… avocados.
The Instant Pot (which merged with the maker of Pyrex earlier this year) is indefatigable. Amazon said it has been a top seller for the past three years, and the Instant Pot DUO60 was among the most gifted items by Prime members this year as well.
And while it really didn’t provide any other context or numbers, Avocados were also a big seller throughout 2019 for Amazon Prime members as well.
OK. Sure.
This is just the first round of Amazon’s “Aren’t We Great?” press releases. Expect another after Christmas as well, telling (in vague terms only) how many millions of devices it sold throughout this holiday season.
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