The juggernaut just keeps rolling on – and this is without drones or blimps.
Amazon shipped over 2 billion items worldwide in 2016 for third-party sellers on its marketplace using its fulfillment services – more than double the figure from 2015 – while FBA-shipped items grew 50% during the holiday season, the company reported.
Reports have estimated Amazon handles more than half of all holiday ecommerce sales in the U.S.
The company’s Seller Fulfilled Prime program, in which select merchants handle Prime’s free two-day or next-day shipping guarantee, saw millions of orders processed last year.
Late-year union issues in the form of labor actions by Amazon Prime Air pilots apparently represented a minor speed bump for the company.
Some other mind-blowing 2016 statistics from Amazon:
- Active sellers using the FBA service grew more than 70% worldwide
- Outside the U.S., FBA units shipped grew more than 80%
- Sellers from 130 countries used FBA to handle customer orders in 185 countries
- Seller Fulfilled Prime added 6 million+ new Prime-eligible items in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Japan
- Amazon sellers worldwide received orders for more than 28 million items on Cyber Monday