Amazon shipped a bonkers number of items to Prime customers in 2017

We're talking billions. Yes, billions.
 By 
Marcus Gilmer
 on 
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Amazon shipped a bonkers number of items to Prime customers in 2017
That's a lot of cardboard boxes Credit: DERNER/action press/REX/Shutterstock

Somewhere deep within his superhero hideout (or supervillain lair, depending on your point of view), Jeff Bezos is probably cackling with delight at the revelation that Amazon Prime customers had more than 5 billion items shipped to them via the online retailer in 2017.

For the first time ever, Amazon revealed the number of Prime shipments over the course of a year, though, overall, the company remained unsurprisingly vague.

In a news release, the company confirmed that "more than five billion items worldwide shipped with Prime in 2017, including free same-day, one-day, and two-day shipping."

Whether that's 5,000,000,001 or 5,400,000,000 is unknown—either way, that's still a lot of product being moved. The world's population stands close to 7.6 billion, so that's two items shipped via Prime for every three people on earth.

The reveal was part of Amazon's year-end Best of Prime announcement, which runs quite the gamut, from most played song on Amazon Music ("Believer," by Imagine Dragons) to the most ordered food item on Amazon Fresh (bananas).

Other tidbits:

  • 17 million people from 200 countries or territories tuned in to Amazon's coverage of NFL's Thursday Night Football games this season.

  • Most of you spent the holidays in a daze. Saturday, Dec. 30, was the biggest streaming day for Prime Video. The most-watched series that day was season 2 of The Grand Tour and the new hit The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

  • The most-purchased items were all Amazon gear: the Fire TV stick with Alexa voice remote, the Echo Dot, and those generic Amazon power cables you can use for your iPhone on the cheap.

So, when people make the jokes about Amazon and world domination, just know that it's just a matter of time before we name the earth Amazonia and I, for one, welcome our new Amazonian overlords.

Topics Amazon

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Marcus Gilmer

Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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