Cyber Monday Amazon’s biggest shopping day ever. But still way behind Alibaba. What future the international Kindle stores?

• Total US online sales Cyber Monday: $6.59 billion
• Black Friday $5.03 billion
• Thanksgiving Day $2.87 billion

A record-breaking holiday for US e-commerce – $14.49 billion spent online – and by some estimates half went to Amazon.

Yet just two weeks earlier almost twice that amount – $25 billion – was spent online in just 24 hours at just one company.

Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce titan, took the equivalent of Black Friday’s total US online sales – $5 billion – in the first fifteen minutes of trading on Singles Day earlier this month.

“It’s easy to look back at the past ten years of the Kindle store and the rise of Amazon as a global e-commerce power and see an unstoppable force.

And realistically there is little chance that Amazon’s dominance in the US, UK and a handful of European countries will be usurped any time soon.

But as those markets become more competitive and more aggressive, so Amazon needs to look abroad to maintain the revenue growth that drives its stock valuation.

The easy options are fast being taken – west Europe, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Australia… China was, if not a fail, certainly not a spectacular success for Amazon, and India is going to be a very long haul…

And while Amazon is clearly making an effort with publishing in India (not just the Kindle store – Amazon also acquired a major publishing house) there are few indications Amazon sees publishing or the Kindle store as a key part of its next stage in globalisation.”

Read more at The New Publishing Standard

Mark Williams writes daily on global publishing matters for The New Publishing Standard.