Business

Amazon reports surging holiday sales

Things are looking fine and dandy at Amazon.com.

The online retailer led by CEO Jeff Bezos said Thursday it had a strong holiday-shopping season and added a million customers to its Amazon Prime two-day shipping program in the third week of December. In fact, the company claims that it shipped enough items with Prime to deliver at least one gift to every household in the US.

Overall, Amazon announced that “the entire 2013 holiday season was [its] best ever, with more than 36.8 million items ordered worldwide on Cyber Monday,” or, Amazon said, 426 per second.

Interestingly, more than half of Amazon customers shopped using mobile devices during the holiday season, highlighting the gadgets’ growing importance to retailers. One measure of this: Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, customers ordered more than five toys per second, the company said.

Amazon said that the new Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles were so popular that at the peak of sales for each, orders were coming in at a rate higher than 1,000 units per minute.

Amazon shares jumped 1.3 percent, to close at $404.39.