No, It didn't fairly well. It's one of the worst selling Nintendo's handheld, even if It manages to sell as much as the PSP  But it's not Nintendo's fault, the handheld market has changed in the past few years. 

Don't be pessimistic, from August/september 2011 to december 2013, the Nintendo 3DS system was selling pretty well. But I guess the quick improve of the smartphones and the PS4 and Xbox One together made the 3DS achieve lower sales, but at the moment the system is performing good. Not as good as the Nintendo DS or even the Game Boy Advance (82 million in 4 years is not a prank), but still is doing good :)

Another thing: the New Nintendo 3DS / 3DS XL in February launched in NA and EU was successful. (Nintendo play well its cards, with Monster Hunter 4 and Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D).

I'm really concerned about the attach rate of the 3DS.
The DS had an attach rate of ~5.66 after six and a half years and lots of piracy.
The 3DS has an attach rate of ~4.2 after four years (with a successor probably rushing in a year and a half from now) and a disappointing mass-appeal lineup.

Big Brain Academy hasn't seen an entry on 3DS hardware.
Brain Age: Concentration Training flopped hard after the multi-million selling prior entries to the series.
Nintendogs+cats sold worse than Nintendogs despite three versions.
Pokémon X/Y is underwhelming compared to D/P and B/W. Pokémon OR/AS doesn't hold up a candle against how good HG/SS was. (The DS has nine Pokémon games, the 3DS has four)
Cooking Mama and its spin-offs did much better on DS than 3DS.
The two Layton games on the 3DS haven't even broke a million, the DS entries sold millions each.
NSMB 2 is disappointing compared to NSMB.
And all that delicious shovelware that sold by the pile on the DS? They all flopped hard on the 3DS. I haven't heard of any third-party shovelware that sold well on the 3DS.

Mind you, this is despite the core audience flourishing.
Etrian Odyssey IV is just short of the original Etrian Odyssey when it came to physical sales, and may very well be over the original when taking into account digital. And, Persona Q has sold much better than every mainline Etrian Odyssey title to date...
Devil Survivor Overclocked has sold better than the original, well, it is an enhanced port. And, the 3DS got quite a few SMT titles, too.
And, well, let's not forget about Fire Emblem. Awakening sold better than the previous four titles in the series, combined.

Well, digital sales are hidden and we aren't able to know how many games were sold through them.

Persona Q has the name of a franchise way more popular than EO, I don't know if that really counts.

You remind me of a stage mom or dad.  It's not enough that their child is couragous enough to get on stage and perform, but you expect them to wow the crowd and help you retire early.

The DS selling over 20m in America is extremely successful, far exceeding that of Nintendo's expectations.  Over 15m 3ds in the US is far from disappointment.  That's still a remarkable number to be proud of.  Standards of acceptance from you or the general public make no waves for Nintendo when they see a return on an investment and they see a positive result.  The legacy of the 3ds is that it did it's job and for a time when they needed it to do its job.  History will see that the 3ds not only made nintendo money, but it also set the course for which nintendo has begun their new model for portables in both the smart phone market and whatever their new handheld will be, if there will be a new handheld after the dual screen series of portables.

3DS is a failure only in regards to a tremendous success that is the DS.  It's like running a mile in 8 minutes, of which I doubt you could do, but the other guy ran it in 7 minutes.  Like saying America is a failure because it's kid's aren't scoring high on standardized testing.  We made Jazz and hip-hop, that's no failure.

I've never seen someone say both.

I think it'll definitely hit 70m lifetime, which is more than solid. Especially considering how weak its software line up was last year and how not so amazing it is this year.

... 3DS is a failure for more reasons than not selling 150m+

mobile killed it.
we've seen DS sell tons because of games like brain age, cocking mama, nintendogs and others.
the audience of this games is not anymore on 3DS, they probably moved to mobile.
Without them, the maximum we can expect is someting in the 70 to 80M.

"because I don´t like it"

Yeah well sorry, that doesn´t make it a failure, the console is plenty of good games and the software and hardware sells are pretty good despite the fall of the handheld market, hardly a failure.