Amazon Christmas Sales

More than 3 million people joined Amazon Prime in the third week of December alone, 200 million items were shipped for free to Prime subscribers, and more than two times as many Amazon devices were sold than last year as part of Amazon's 2015 holiday season, the online retail giant said today.

Christmas Eve became the biggest ever day for Prime Now deliveries, and Prime Video also saw an uptick in usage, doubling the amount of hours streamed during the holiday period in 2014. A record number of movies were watched on the service, with the most viewed — The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 — appearing to be a victory over major rival Netflix, which lost the US streaming rights to the wildly popular movie series in August. As Netflix has found success with original shows like Orange is the New Black and Jessica Jones, Amazon has followed its path — its original series The Man in the High Castle became the most watched TV season ever on Prime Video.

In addition to showing the growing market penetration of Prime, Amazon's sales data also shows a shift toward mobile. Almost 70 percent of Amazon.com customers shopped on a mobile device during the period, with the number of US-based Prime members using a smartphone to buy items more than doubling from last year's total. The number of customers using Amazon's mobile app also doubled from 2014's total, and on Cyber Monday, the retailer said it was processing 33 electronics orders per second from a mobile device.