Amazon.com posted Wednesday stronger than expected first quarter results, in part driven by strong sales in its electronics and general merchandise categories.
The online retailing giant also issued a forecast for the current quarter and year that shows greater strength than Wall Street's current estimates.
Shares of Amazon, however, were down roughly 4 percent in after-hours trading to $77.77 a share.
During the first quarter, Amazon generated net income of 34 cents a share to $143 million, up 30 percent compared with the previous year. Revenues jumped 37 percent to $4.13 billion in the quarter, verses the same period a year ago.
Wall Street was expecting the company to report earnings of 32 cents a share on revenues of $4.08 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
The online retailer got a large leg up from its worldwide electronics and general merchandise sales, which soared 56 percent to $1.48 billion in the quarter, compared with year ago figures.
Amazon's global media sales rose a sharp 28 percent to $2.54 billion in the quarter, compared with last year.
"Our sales growth this quarter was driven by low prices and millions of in-stock items available for immediate shipment," Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, said in a statement. "We're grateful to our customers."
And in forecasting its second quarter and year-end, Amazon expects to generate greater revenues or stronger earnings than a consensus of analysts, according to Thomson Reuters, which tracks analysts projections.
Although Wall Street expects Amazon to post revenues of $3.84 billion in the second quarter, Amazon gave guidance it expects to exceed that level - with expectations of generating between approximately $3.88 billion to $4.1 billion.
And while analysts expect Amazon to post operating income of $125.3 million in the quarter, the company said it expects to do between $120 million to $160 million.
The online retailing giant expects its year-end operating income will outstrip current year-end estimates, saying it expects to raise between $740 million to $940 million in operating income. Wall Street had been expecting Amazon to do $662.3 million for the year.
And on the revenue front, Amazon expects to generate $19.1 billion to $20 billion, compared with Wall Street's projections of $19.3 billion.
Which would you choose during the holiday shopping season: a long line at the local Costco warehouse store or an average download wait of 115 seconds per page on Costco's e-commerce site?
During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, a third of the 30 Web sites that Keynote Competitive Research monitors during the holiday season showed a significant drop in speed. Online shoppers, despite using high-speed connections, faced up to 2 minutes to process their e-commerce transactions, compared with the 1- to 2-second blip most are accustomed to, according to Keynote, which released its report Tuesday.
Traditional brick-and-mortar retailers that recently beefed up their e-commerce site were the group largely affected with traffic slowdowns, according to the report. And the research firm noted that product searches and check-out transactions were the two areas on sites that were affected the most with sluggish performance.
In Costco's case, for example, its site slowed by as much as 500 percent between 7 a.m. PT and 1 p.m. on Cyber Monday to log on, add items to a shopping cart, and check out, according to the report.
Toys "R" Us suffered as much as a 300 percent slowdown in downloading pages between 10 a.m. PT and 2 p.m. on Cyber Monday, translating to an average wait of 30 seconds to 60 seconds per page. J.Crew experienced a similar slowdown, with the average wait increasing more than 400 percent, according to Keynote. Black Friday and Cyber Monday typically result in a 5 percent to 10 percent increase in site sluggishness, Keynote said.
As you debate the merits of venturing out to hit the local retail stores this holiday season, verses spending a little more time processing transactions online, consider this: which situation affords you more time to eat another Christmas cookie and drink more eggnog?
Online consumers have become relatively slow shoppers, according to a recent report on digital window shopping.
Online shoppers are now being more cautious than they were two years ago, and are taking more than half a day longer before making a buying decision and completing a transaction, according to a report by ScanAlert, a security-certification company in Bay Area that analyzed 2.6 million online sales executed on 470 Web sites from May 2005 to May 2007.
Since May 2005, the average time between a consumer's first visit to a Web site and an actual purchase increased from 19 to 34 hours, according to the report. One fourth of the shoppers took more than three days to decide what to buy, and one fifth took more than a week.
In discussing reasons for the increased time it takes consumers to make a purchase, the study cited their
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