Amazon Echo Dot Continues Streak as Best-Selling Item On Black Friday

Amazon announced on Tuesday that it had sold millions of Amazon devices over the Thanksgiving weekend. The five days, including Thanksgiving and Black Friday weekend, culminated in the biggest single shopping day in the company’s history on Cyber Monday. That includes selling millions more devices made by Amazon compared to last year.

Smart Speakers and Smart Homes

Alexa-powered devices and smart home products both had record-breaking sales over the long weekend. The Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote were at the top of all sales in the U.S. on Black Friday. The smart speaker and remote were also the best-selling of all Amazon’s products worldwide during the holiday weekend. Beyond Amazon’s creations, the iRobot Roomba 675 Robot Vacuum, Furbo Dog Camera, and Wemo Mini Smart Plug were the most popular choices for smart home products. Amazon also sold millions of its own brand of smart plug and related devices.

“We’re focused on making this holiday season more convenient than ever for our customers, especially given how short this holiday shopping season will be,” CEO Worldwide Consumer at Amazon Jeff Wilke said in a statement.“We are thrilled that customers continue to come to Amazon in record numbers to discover what they need and want for the holidays. Thank you to our customers and employees all around the world for making this holiday shopping weekend the best yet.”

Voice Assistant Gifting

Amazon didn’t go into detail about what people asked Alexa for this year as it did last year. The use of voice assistants in the kitchen for recipes and cooking timers has likely only grown in the last year, even if it was not specifically highlighted.

That Amazon’s devices had a record-breaking weekend yet again suggests that the adoption rate of smart speakers isn’t slacking off, and may only be accelerating. The deep discount on the more basic versions of the Echo certainly helped, but they don’t tell the whole story. The new Echo Studio was not discounted and the Echo Dot with Clock had only a small cut in price, and yet they are already on weeks-long backorder in the U.S., United Kingdom, and Canada. Both are more premium versions of the standard products but are evidently in high demand.

The real benefit to Amazon of the success of its smart speakers is how it brings people and homes into the Alexa ecosystem. Encouraging people to buy one or more of the 16 new products Amazon debuted at its hardware event in September becomes a lot easier when they can all be synced together through Alexa.

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