At peak, Amazon sold a whopping 306 items per second in 2012

At peak, Amazon sold a whopping 306 items per second in 2012:

Amazon has released a large amount of data about online sales in 2012, with lots of factoids and vague figures for digital downloads, purchases, and product shipments. And the biggest piece of data revealed by the company was the number of packages it sold on the peak day of 2012.
On Nov. 26, Amazon sold 26.5 million items worldwide across all product categories. That equates to a whopping 306 items per second, a new record, according to the company.
Amazon also shed some insight into ebook purchases for the year. For instance, it revealed that 23 of its self-publishing (Kindle Direct Publishing) authors each sold over 250,000 copies of their respective books in 2012. And the most gifted ebook sold during the holiday season? That would be number wizard Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t.
Ultimately, there isn’t much useful information for shareholder to determine how well Amazon is doing in regard to its digital purchases. But the new data did share lots of information about physical product shipments. (Amazon customers purchased enough copies of the Fifty Shades trilogy by E.L. James, including Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed and the trilogy box set, to create a stack 445 times taller than the Seattle Space Needle.
We’ve pulled out the interesting bits from Amazon’s press release and pasted them below. And as always, let us know your thoughts in the comment section.
Amazon 2012 purchase data:

• Cyber Monday 2012 was the biggest day ever for Kindle sales worldwide.
• Christmas Day was the biggest day ever for digital downloads
• The most gifted Kindle book during the holiday season was The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t by Nate Silver.
• The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library now has over 250,000 books (up from 75,000 in 2011).
• More than 175,000 exclusive books were added to the Kindle store in 2012.
• 23 Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) authors each sold over 250,000 copies of their books in 2012.
• Top KDP authors include Hugh Howey, author of the New York Times best-seller Wool, Stephanie Bond, author of Stop the Wedding!, Barbara Freethy, and CJ Lyons.
• Sales of apps and games during the holiday period alone were up more than 250 percent over the same period last year.
• The Amazon MP3 store has sold enough music for everyone at Woodstock ’69 to jam out to another three days of music for peace and love.
• On its peak day, Amazon’s worldwide fulfillment network shipped over 15.6 million units across all product categories.
• On the peak day, Nov. 26, customers ordered more than 26.5 million items worldwide across all product categories, which is a record-breaking 306 items per second.
• Amazon customers added more than 15 million toys to their Wishlists this holiday season.

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