Dive Brief:

• Cyber Monday was "once again the single biggest shopping day in the company's history, based on the number of items ordered worldwide," Amazon said in a press release on Tuesday. The announcement came amid Adobe's report of record Cyber Monday sales of $9.4 billion in wider retail.

• The e-commerce giant avoided specifics in noting, for example, that it sold "tens of millions of toys" ("more toys this Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined​ than ever before​"), and that its Marketplace sellers "sold more items during Cyber Monday 2019 than any other 24-hour period in the company's history."

• Amazon customers also bought "a record number of Amazon Devices globally" over the holiday weekend, with best-selling electronics in the U.S. including Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, plus non-Amazon items like an Instant Pot and iRobot Roomba. And Cyber Monday was also "the single biggest shopping day for Amazon Fashion worldwide, with more items purchased than any other single day in the company's history," the company said. 

Dive Insight:

When it comes to red-letter sales days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Amazon tends to be a broken record. That is, the e-commerce giant, year upon year, consistently outdoes itself during such events, giving its press releases a sort of repetitive flair.

But the company did change things up somewhat in this year's announcement. While Amazon noted Tuesday that its third-party sellers are "mostly small and medium-sized businesses," last year the company also shared that Black Friday sales by such businesses worldwide grew more than 20% year over year. Wells Fargo Senior Analyst Brian Fitzgerald in a client note emailed to Retail Dive said he was again looking for that level of detail.

Amazon didn't immediately respond to Retail Dive's request for more information, including the third-party sales volume. For now, a clearer sense of sales volumes or growth will have to be gleaned from other sources. Instinet analyst Michael Baker, for one, in his quarterly e-commerce sales recap released last week, said that Amazon's growth is decelerating, as e-commerce growth more generally picked up after slowing down last quarter.

For Thanksgiving and Black Friday shopping, Edison Trends, meanwhile, in a breakdown of consumer spending by retailer, found that Nordstrom, with a 60% rise, and Walmart, with a 53% increase, saw the biggest year-over-year gains, followed by Amazon with a 49% increase. Other retailers also saw higher average online order value increases during Thanksgiving and Black Friday: Best Buy $18, Nordstrom $17, Walmart $11 and Amazon $4, with Etsy, Kohl's, Macy's, eBay, Target and J.C. Penney all experiencing declines.

Amazon also touted its many fulfillment options, which now includes pick-up at various retailers including its own Whole Foods stores, free one-day delivery of more than 10 million items for its Prime members, and same-day delivery of millions of items to Prime members in 46 major metropolitan areas. The delivery speed-up is costly, more so than some analysts had expected. Wells Fargo's Fitzgerald on Monday said his team has lowered their estimates for Amazon's operating income and earnings in 2020 and 2021 because "we now view our prior forecasts as potentially underestimating ongoing investments in 1-day Prime delivery."