Orders were worse than a typical month.
November-December 25 was the lowest grossing month on Amazon this year. TBH I did better when I first started Amazon then how I am doing now.
Talking to my Commercial pick up USPS guy I am not alone. He said most places he doesn’t even do a daily pick up any more.
This year (2026) will be 25 years in business for me. I wonder If I will last much longer.
The calendar worked against a lot of sellers.
The timing of Black Friday was later than many years.
This year was different in other ways, including who gained and who lost compared to previous years. My results were way up for Sept Oct and Nov, but December was half the volume in the three previous months.
Years with no real hot products are different as well.
Since my offerings are totally self-indulgence, this was a record year for my sales on Ebay, and I cannot satisfactorily explain why. Even many of my sales in this slower month are items which have been listed for years.
As you all know, I am prone to speculate and generalize. I have no grand explanation for who the winners and losers have been in sales this year. But from the complaints of some Ebay sellers, many of their businesses have models which I would never have expected to survive. These are not noobies so I have to believe something significant has affected their buyers.
I do not believe that the economy is behaving like a K curve either. Most of my buyers are not wealthy and buy only when they have money in their pocket after paying their bills.
As a seller:
Sales on Amazon were terrible this holiday season. EBay was good.
As a buyer:
Amazon screwed up over half of my orders ( Either not as described, damaged, or late ). I’m returning a lot.
My one eBay order was done right.
Overall:
Amazon continues the trend of having sellers in lockstep. EBay continues to be more flexible.
My ebay sales were up this year but I was offering more so??
USPS has been horrible for me. Purchased over black friday, Shipped on December 1st, arrived on December 26 etc… 30 friggin days for many order to get to where they needed to go. I’m lucky in that I convinced an Etsy buyer to call me because I had to refund her and she got it today. She loves it and wanted to pay for the order.
Another customer drove me crazy with her messages (Etsy again). She sent me a message and said she did not order a runner with bells like she got. OK fine, we make mistakes even I do, so I sent her the correct runner. No sooner than sending that out, she said “Oh and I did not get the Star tabletopper either.” So I sent that out. Saturday she said she got both runners in the mail but no return label. I finally found her phone number and called her. Turns out the first runner she complained about WAS NOT FROM ME! My order to her took 30 days to get to her, the second shipment was right behind, and the third shipment is taking it’s time (again). So she said she’d return the extra two…whenever it gets there but HER mistake (wrong store) and my desire to quickly take care of customers cost me $15 for three unecessary labels. Thanks post office. I should have asked her in the beginning to send a picture – even found the Etsy store she bought from when she INSISTED that they all came from me. It’s Christmas and I wanted her to have what she ordered. UGH…small loss, big headache. Have not dared to look at overall numbers yet
Big time blechhh for Amazon. At least I had other projects to work on.
I had a few good sales on eBay, repeat buyers.
Sorry for the loss and headache. However, we find this pays back big time in the long run.
We have always had the policy, (internal) “Spend whatever it takes to help the customer. Even if it is more than the revenue associated with the order.”
You just never know when payback will come, or even if it did.
When we started our business, we made slides out of computer files. One order had an error with one slide. The customer was speaking in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. We hired a private plane to take that one slide and deliver it.
It was a blah year. Definitely not a great year. I’ll have to wait until the final numbers come in for December and will be able to measure just how rough it was. Through November, I was down over $90K in sales. December alone might have matched that. 
Ebay sales were great.
Very few of the policies enacted by Amazon this year have been done to increase sales. They are too busy nickel and dimeing sellers over Safe T claims and restricted products and other bot errors.
None of Amazon’s policies are to increase sales, They are to increase Amazon revenue and decrease Amazon liability at the expense of 3p sellers.