NEWS If you spent Boxing Day watching Pirates of the Caribbean, listening to Dido's Life for Rent and cooking lunch on the George Foreman Grill while the kids played Fifa 2004 upstairs on the PlayStation 2 then it's likely you're one of the thousands of consumers who benefited from an Amazon Christmas.
On its busiest day alone Amazon.co.uk despatched more than 300,000 items ranging from CDs and DVDs to home electronics and kitchenware this Christmas and claims 99 per cent of holiday orders were shipped in time for the big day.
Amazon's best-selling booklist revealed a preference in the UK for non-fiction, with contemporary grammar bible Eats, Shoots and Leaves… topping the chart followed by Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany and two seasonal ever-presents of recent years Michael Moore and Bill Bryson.
Former heavyweight boxer George Foreman was the undisputed king of kitchenware, with his low fat grill taking up three of the top 10 chart places.
DVD players and digital cameras were the most popular items in the electronics chart in which USB storage devices for cameras and MP3 players also showed strong sales.
Also for the die-hard techie Norton anti-virus products were the third and eighth best-selling software products.
They may not be the most fun items to unwrap and play with on Christmas morning but it at least means many vulnerable users going online with a new PC over the holidays will have been better protected against a host of threats waiting to attack naïve first time surfers.
Microsoft also faired well under UK Christmas trees. Money 2004 and Office 2003 occupied fifth and sixth spot respectively in the software chart.
Comments
There are 2 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Erm...Amazon managed to ship 99 per cent of its orders in time for the holidays..?? That must mean that myself and many other people I know must be in the 1% minority.
In fact, I am still waiting for an order (ordered 4 Dec) which I am informed will not reach me until at least February....
I also had to cancel one order and buy it last minute on another website (Game's website in fact, who were fantastic in shipping it straight away despite it being after their guruanteed to arrive for Christmas date).
Just a word of warning - amending your delivery options i.e. changing the postage from super saver to first class (which you would think would be quicker), means that essentially Amazon treats your order as a new order, therefore delaying it further! I got caught out on that one...
2. anonymous
Got my camera from amazon and then the price went down by £31 within a couple of days! Those couple of Days we call Christmas!!! (Christmas for Amazon not me this year) They weren't the cheapest at the time, they just could deliver the camera to my work address as I had an account!