Yet the big disappointment from Amazon provided arguably the most important lesson for investors.
Namely: Be wary of bullish reports that come late in a quarter, especially those that surface in December.
The week between Christmas and New Year's tends to be a dead one for public companies and news junkies alike, which means any story from a tech giant has a good chance of getting some prominent play both online and in print.
Such was the case on Dec. 27, when Amazon issued a statement that said overall holiday sales and those made through its Amazon Prime delivery service both set records.
The company said then that sales of its Kindle device also set a holiday record, and that Amazon converted more than 1 million harried shoppers into Prime subscribers during the third week of December alone.
All that sure sounded impressive, and the widely-reported news helped to raise expectations about Amazon's fourth-quarter results, as well as its prospects for 2014.
What the company didn't say then was that its shipping costs rose 19 percent in the fourth quarter, putting a big damper on the benefit from all those additional Amazon Prime sales.
Only now do investors know just how much those extra sales hurt the company's bottom line, as Amazon barely missed Wall Street's revenue expectations yet missed per-share profit estimates by almost 50 percent.
The Seattle-based ecommerce giant this week also issued a disappointing first-quarter forecast, while adding that it might have to raise the price of its Amazon Prime service by as much as $40.
That news helped drive its stock down as much as 10 percent Friday.
Taken together, the large shortfall in profit on sales that were only slightly worse than expected, along with the move to raise prices, s! trongly suggest that the company took a loss on at least some of its Amazon Prime sales as delivery costs rose.
The take-away for mom-and-pop investors is this: While big-money growth investors will hold their noses and keep supporting the stock despite Amazon's razor-thin profit margins, they won't support incremental sales growth that flat out hurts the company's bottom line.
Big post-earnings stock moves are nothing new for Amazon, of course. Its stock dropped as much as 8 percent last April the day after a lackluster report, then came roaring back in the second half of last year.
But Friday's stock drop came on very heavy trading volume, with more than 11 million shares trading hands by midday Friday, compared to average volume of less than 3 million shares.
With the shares still up almost 90 percent over the past two years, many on Wall Street may be tempted to take some profits off the table now that one of the company's growth drivers, namely Amazon Prime, has been shown to be a drag on earnings growth.
And next year, investors big and small may want to view any bullish holiday-season news from Amazon with a bit more skeptical eye.
John Shinal has covered tech and financial markets for 15 years at Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal Digital Network and others. Follow him on Twitter: @johnshinal.
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