What: Just as we expected from the advertising giant, Amazon has announced its fourth-quarter sales are up 21% to $87.4 billion, compared with $72.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019. Net sales also increased by 20% to $280.5 billion, compared with $232.8 billion in 2018. The data also shows that there are now over 150 million Prime members around the world.

Why: Though Amazon has more than 197 million visitors and is deemed the killer of small businesses, it’s no doubt brands are feeling the pressure to grow their revenue the same way and stand out in a saturated market. We can see this in brands like Walmart who are focused on building a marketplace advertising business of their own, and can now use this data to create a benchmark of their own.

The reason: The growth spans across their entire marketplace, though we can see that tens of millions of Amazon devices were bought worldwide and customers interacted with Alexa billions of times each week. Independent third-party sellers also sold more than a billion items during the holiday season, including more than 100 million items shipped with Prime Free One-Day Delivery – making up a large part of this monumental growth.

On assisting advertisers with both sales and advertising, David Fildes, Director of Investor Relations at Amazon, said “I think they appreciate the fidelity we can provide around shopping outcomes. We’re uniquely positioned to do this given our retail business.”