Amazon celebrates 'best Christmas ever'

Amazon.com is celebrating its best ever Christmas with record sales and bullish claims about the number of orders it was able to successfully fulfil.

At the peak of the holiday shopping season Amazon shipped more than two million items in one single day - or 23 items per second - and popular items such as CDs and DVDs were flying off the warehouse shelves in record numbers while consumer electronics surpassed books for the first time.

Amazon's music store sold more than one million units per week for two consecutive weeks in December while the DVD store broke its single title record, selling more than 13,000 copies of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Extended Edition) in a single day. For fact fans, that equates to a staggering 54,100 hours of that single movie alone which would take 6 years to watch back to back, or a little longer with toilet and snack breaks.

The UK contributed heftily to the overall success and Amazon.co.uk claims to have delivered 99 per cent of orders on time.

At its peak Amazon.co.uk shipped more than 400,000 items in a single day - almost a quarter of the company's worldwide daily peak total. The site's gift wrap service also proved popular getting through more than 85 miles of gift wrap and ribbon - enough to paper and bow the roads from London to Southampton.

Top selling items in the UK included Michael Palin's Himalaya which topped the book chart, while Harry Potter had the top selling DVD and video with The Prisoner of Azkaban. U2 had the best selling CD with How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb while the iPod music player they endorsed for Apple was the top selling item worldwide for Amazon.

Showing a mature approach to booting up those new PCs on Christmas morning, UK shoppers made Norton Internet Security 2005 their top-selling item of software.