Amazon Ends 2014 With New Sales Record

Amazon has set the 2015 bar high for itself. The company announced Monday (Jan. 5) that it set a new sales record in 2014 in terms of number of items purchased through the online market place.

According to Amazon, more than 2 billion items across the globe were purchased through the e-commerce site – more than 40 percent of those sales were made through the over 2 million merchants that do business through Amazon.

“it’s been a record-setting year for selling on Amazon,” Amazon Marketplace Vice President Peter Faricy said. “We’re seeing strong growth from sellers listing their items across our global marketplaces. In fact, there are now more than a billion offers for customers to browse from sellers who are listing items for sale outside their home country.

Amazon’s new milestone certainly boosted a new trend of global shopping; PayPal, once part of Amazon rival eBay, reported that one-quarter of its transactions are now international, and predicts that by 2018 cross-border purchases made with PayPal will more than triple the $105 billion worth of international transactions made in 2013.

Experts say the trend is unsurprising. With the ease of Internet shopping, consumers now demand items for purchase from across the world as easily as they do from across the country.

The online shopping trend is boosting convenience for merchants, too. “The growth of mobile and the introduction of the Amazon Seller App have also been a big win for sellers this year,” Faricy said. “Sellers are constantly telling us they value the flexibility of managing their businesses on-the-go from their tablets and mobile devices.

Amazon’s latest achievement was announced just weeks after the company confirmed impressive stats about the 2014 holiday shopping season. A day after Christmas, Amazon said it acquired more than 10 million new Amazon Prime members, and that its customers ordered more than 10 times the number of items for same-day delivery – a perk of Amazon Prime – in 2014 than they did in 2013.

Amazon says it expects to expand its Amazon Prime program even further across the globe in the coming years.