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." ...