Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc., the world’s largest Internet retailer, rose in Nasdaq trading after saying it had its best-ever holiday sales even as overall online spending at U.S. retailers dipped.

More than 6.3 million items were ordered worldwide on Dec. 15, its peak day, the Seattle-based company said today in a statement. Spokeswoman Sally Fouts declined to provide specific revenue or profit data.

“People like Amazon have set a very, very high bar,” Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst at Jupiter Research in New York, said today in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. She said Amazon.com’s breadth of offering, quality of product reviews and “incredibly good” on-time deliveries attracted consumers to the site.

Online spending at U.S. retailers declined 1 percent in the holiday season through Dec. 19, research firm ComScore Inc. said last week, less than the 19 percent gain seen during the 2007 holiday season. Inclement weather during the second half of December may have caused more people to buy over the Internet instead of driving to the mall, SpendingPulse said yesterday.

Excluding fuel, total sales may have dropped 4 percent during the holidays, SpendingPulse said.

More than 5.6 million items were shipped on Amazon.com’s peak day and 99 percent of goods arrived in time to meet holiday deadlines, it said. Top-selling items included Samsung Electronics Co.’s televisions, Nintendo Co.’s Wii, Apple Inc.’s IPod touch, J.K. Rowling’s “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” and Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” books.

Amazon.com rose 34 cents to $51.78 at 4 p.m. in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading, after earlier advancing 4.9 percent. The shares have fallen 44 percent this year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Allison Abell Schwartz in New York at aabell@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: December 26, 2008 16:19 EST