Amazon.com Inc. kicked off the last week of 2020 this morning by sharing data about its holiday season e-commerce sales and detailing some of the operational changes it has implemented to adjust to the pandemic.

Amazon delivered more than 1.5 billion items to customers worldwide this holiday, the company said. The figure only includes shipped merchandise from the toys, home products, beauty and personal care products and electronics sections, meaning the total tally across the online retail giant’s entire catalog is likely higher.

Third-party merchants that sell their goods via Amazon had a strong showing as well in December. Amazon said that “independent businesses” operating on its marketplace, a category it says comprises mostly small and medium-sized firms, sold close to a billion items during the holiday season. Those independent businesses’ combined worldwide sales increased more than 50% compared with 2019. 

Amazon had to make big changes to its logistics network this year to adjust to the pandemic. The company hired hundreds of thousands of new workers to keep up with the surge in e-commerce orders, while spending more than $10 billion in 2020 to keep employees at locations such as fulfillment centers safe. Amazon says it has made more than 150 “significant process improvements” to that end, from the introduction of social distancing rules in warehouses to the implementation of regular temperature checks.

Amazon detailed today how it also took steps to help partners adjust to the new challenges of 2020. Since the start of the year, the company claims to have absorbed more than $5 billion in operational costs on behalf of independent businesses selling on its marketplace and launched 250-plus tools to help them manage their operations. In its hometown of Seattle, Amazon granted more tha $11 million over worth of cash grants and free rent to more than 900 small businesses.

Amazon’s e-commerce unit wasn’t the only part of its business that marked notable milestones in 2020. During the year, the company’s Amazon Web Services unit provided more than $1 billion worth of cloud computing credits to early-stage startups and reached record revenue. The Alexa device lineup, a core pillar of Amazon’s consumer technology strategy, fared well too. The company introduced several new additions to the line in 2020 and this morning it divulged that the Alexa-enabled Fire TV Stick remote control made it to the list of the most purchased items on its marketplace during the holiday season. 

Overall, Amazon said, it had a“ record-breaking holiday season — with our biggest-ever customer savings, small business growth.”

Some of those newly set records will likely factor into the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report, which is usually published at the end of January. Amazon said in October that it expects revenues of between $112 billion and $121 billion during the fourth quarter, well above the average analyst estimate of $112.3 billion at the time.

Photo: Amazon