Amazon's Holiday Outlook Difficult to Fathom

SAN FRANCISCO - Amazon's(AMZN Quote) wider-than-usual revenue guidance for the fourth quarter has some analysts wondering how bad the holiday season will actually be.

The online retailer beat Wall Street's third-quarter earnings estimates by 2 cents, but raised concerns when it offered fourth-quarter revenue guidance in the range of $6 billion and $7 billion, which translates into a growth of between 6% and 23% and factors in more than 500 basis points of negative impact from foreign exchange.

"It is a wider range than we have given before, both in dollar terms and percentage terms," said Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak on Wednesday's conference call with analysts. "We think that is prudent in this environment and again, we are going to focus on what we do best, which is satisfying customers and we think we are well-positioned to do that, so that's what we plan on doing."

Amazon's shares slipped as much as 14% in after-hours trading on Wednesday. The stock was down 6% to $46.99 in recent trading.

Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst for Sanford Bernstein, criticized Amazon's broad guidance in his research.

"We think this is unrealistically pessimistic even in today's environment," he wrote in his research. "Given that management must already have some idea of October's performance, we think the updated range of revenues for the fourth quarter, namely $6 billion to $7 billion, is too wide to be of much help to investors."

Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth noted in his research that a year ago, Amazon had provided a revenue guidance range of $450 million for the fourth quarter, far narrower than the $1 billion range the company is offering now.