The holidays have been very good to Amazon, with CEO and founder Jeff Bezos proudly announcing that Amazon Prime has “tens of millions” of members, which means big money for the company considering it charges $79 a year for a subscription.

The company’s good luck began on Cyber Monday when it logged more than 36.8 million items ordered, and as Christmas drew near, the orders just kept piling up.

“Amazon Prime membership continues to grow, and we now have tens of millions of members worldwide. They benefit from all-you-can-eat free two-day shipping on millions of eligible items and our members have a voracious appetite,” said Bezos in Amazon’s post-Christmas news release this morning.

“We are extremely grateful to our customers around the world and wish everyone the very best for the coming year.”

Though Amazon is basking in its glory, customers aren’t too happy with service the company is providing, with thousands of packages reportedly not being delivered on time

Amazon stated that everything on their end has been processed and tendered, so packages should have arrived on time – however, this obviously didn’t happen, hence the number of complaints its received, and so the company says it’ll be looking into the delivery carrier’s performance to see where things went wrong.

According to reports, both UPS and FedEx, the delivery services Amazon uses, were overwhelmed with the amount of last-minute orders and bad weather, thus deliveries were delayed.

“UPS understands the importance of your holiday shipments. UPS is experiencing heavy holiday volume and making every effort to get packages to their destination; however, the volume of air packages in our system exceeded the capacity of our network immediately preceding Christmas so some shipments were delayed. UPS is not making pickups or deliveries on Christmas Day and will resume normally scheduled service on December 26,” UPS said in a statement.

Though this statement was aimed at pacifying the angry mob of people who didn’t get their packages on time, it just fueled their fury even more. Fortunately, there were many who defended the company, especially the delivery team which worked its asses off even on Christmas eve and during the inclement weather.  Several employees even spoke up to say that the company wasn’t at fault, and that it’s doing its best to deliver packages ordered just a few days before Christmas.

And to extinguish the flame and keep consumers happy, Amazon is refunding shipping charges and offering $20 gift cards to customers who did not get their gifts delivered in time for Christmas day.

So what does this kerfuffle tell us?

First, online shopping is just going to grow bigger and bigger as more people choose to shop on the net instead of going out and buying presents themselves.  Which means Amazon and other online retailers will be raking in tons of money during the holiday seasons especially. Perhaps it might be wise for Amazon  to ramp up the deployment of its delivery drones?

Second, if you don’t want your packages to be delayed, order them earlier so you aren’t caught up the holiday rush.  This isn’t the first time delivery delays have happened, and if you’re living in one of the colder states that typically experiences bad weather at this time of year, you can expect that this might delay the delivery of your packages.

And third, remember that delivery guys are only human, they can only do so much. They work hard and even sacrifice not being with their own families just to get your packages delivered to you on time. So be kind to your delivery guys, they’re doing the best they can.