Monday, February 25, 2008

Jewelry Store Retail Diamond Sales up More Than 100% in Fourth Quarter 2007


SEATTLE, Feb 12, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that diamond sales by Amazon increased more than 100 percent in fourth quarter 2007 compared with fourth quarter 2006. Each quarter, an increasing number of Amazon.com's tens of millions of customers are shopping the Amazon.com Jewelry & Watches store, especially for important gift-giving occasions such as Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.

"We're very excited about the growth in our Jewelry store," said Peter Lai, Director, Amazon.com Jewelry & Watches store. "Not only are our customers choosing to purchase shoes, electronics and beauty items from Amazon.com, but they are also choosing to make, at times, very personal purchasing decisions with us, such as diamonds, and we take that very seriously."

Everything from pendants to stud earrings to create-your-own engagement rings were extremely popular with Amazon customers this past holiday season. The 14k White Gold Journey Curve Pendant, Platinum Diamond Stud Earrings and the 2 Carat Round Cut Stone were among the top sellers. Diamond-encrusted watches and various black diamond jewelry also did very well; Amazon added over 150 new black diamond styles in the fourth quarter alone. One of the leading top sellers was the Black and White Diamond Infinity Pendant, and top-selling diamond watches in the fourth quarter included the Cartier Tank Divan 18k Yellow Gold Diamond Mini Ladies Watch, the Chopard Happy Sport Ladies Watch and the Movado Kara Watch.

In addition to the increase in retail diamond sales, gemstones did extremely well during the fourth quarter. Top-selling gemstone styles included the 14k White Gold Coated Swiss Blue Topaz Teardrop Earrings, the 14k White Gold Round Blue Topaz and Diamond Pendant and 14k Yellow Gold Channel Set Round Coated Blue Topaz Hoop Earrings.

Every piece of jewelry sold by Amazon.com is inspected by jewelry professionals to verify quality attributes and ensure an excellent product. Customers will find detailed product specifications about each of the piece's components, including gemstones, settings and metal stamps. A Learning Center provides buying guides for pearls, diamonds, precious metals and watches. Loose stones are independently certified to be a specific cut, clarity, color, shape and weight. Finally, the store provides all of the tools and helpful information that Amazon.com customers know and love, such as Customer Reviews, Top Sellers lists, So You'd Like To guides and Listmania lists.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc., seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, tools, auto & industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and the Joyo Amazon websites at www.joyo.cn and www.amazon.cn.

As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, significant amount of indebtedness, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007, and all subsequent filings.

SOURCE: Amazon.com, Inc.

1 comment:

robert said...

I love to wear Luxury watches...