Amazon's Holiday Outlook Difficult to Fathom

Anmuth said Amazon has limited visibility into the crucial holiday season and even less insight on the impact of foreign currency.

"While Amazon has held up well in recent quarters through the early part of the slowdown, we think the company is more likely to be impacted going forward as high demographic customers pull back more on spending and competing retailers discount more aggressively," he wrote.

Amazon's third-quarter results mimicked some of the same trends that its rival eBay(EBAY Quote) is also seeing. The online auction giant got slammed last week when it offered a weaker-than-expected revenue outlook, plagued by a strengthening U.S. dollar that is hurting its business overseas, as well as softening consumer spending in a down economy.

Lindsay, however, pointed out that Amazon's number of active users in the third quarter grew 17% vs. a year ago, compared to only a 3% increase for eBay.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are also expected to suffer over the holidays -- in fact even more so than online retailers. National Retail Federation estimates only a 2.2% increase in sales for November and December combined- the two busiest shopping months of the year. That would be a significant drop from the 3% increase retailers saw a year ago.

Mark Mahaney, an analyst for Citigroup, wrote in his research that while Amazon provided an unusually wide guidance range for the fourth quarter, "we certainly believe the mid-point is doable whereas both the high end and low end of the guidance range seem remarkably unbelievable."