Amazon.com, Inc is an American-based multinational electronic commerce company. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is America's largest online retailer, with nearly three times the internet sales revenue of runner up Staples, Inc.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and launched it online in 1995. It started as an on-line bookstore but soon diversified to product lines of VHS, DVD, music CDs and MP3s, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, etc. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan. It also provides international shipping to certain countries for some of its products.
On January 15, 2009, a survey published by Verdict Research found that Amazon was the UK's favorite music and video retailer, and came third in overall retail rankings.
History
Amazon was founded in 1994, spurred by what Bezos called "regret minimization framework", his effort to fend off regret for not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush. While company lore says Bezos wrote the business plan while he and his wife drove from New York to Seattle, that account appears to be apocryphal.
The company began as an online bookstore; while the largest brick-and-mortar bookstores and mail-order catalogs for books might offer 200,000 titles, an on-line bookstore could offer more. Bezos named the company "Amazon" after the world's biggest river. Since 2000, Amazon's logotype is an arrow leading from A to Z, representing customer satisfaction (as it forms a smile) and the goal to have every product in the alphabet.
In 1994, the company incorporated in the state of Washington, beginning service in July 1995, and was reincorporated in 1996 in Delaware. The first book Amazon.com sold was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. Amazon.com issued its initial public offering of stock on May 15, 1997, trading under the NASDAQ stock exchange symbol AMZN, at an IPO price of US$18.00 per share ($1.50 after three stock splits in the late 1990s).
Amazon's initial business plan was unusual: the company did not expect a profit for four to five years; the strategy was effective. Amazon grew steadily in the late 1990s while other Internet companies grew blindingly fast. Amazon's "slow" growth provoked stockholder complaints: that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough. When the dot-com bubble burst, and many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered, and, finally, turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million, just 1˘ per share, on revenues of more than $1 billion, but the profit was symbolically important.
The company remains profitable: 2003 net income was $35.3 million, $588.50 million in 2004, $359 million in 2005, and $190 million in 2006 (including a $662 million charge for R&D in 2006).
On November 21, 2005, Amazon entered the S&P 500 index, replacing AT&T after it merged with SBC Communications. On December 31, 2008, Amazon entered the S&P 100 index, replacing Merrill Lynch after it was taken over by Bank of America.
In 1999, Time magazine named Jeff Bezos Person of the Year, recognizing the company's success in popularizing on-line shopping.
Product Lines
Amazon has steadily branched into retail sales of music CDs, videotapes and DVDs, software, consumer electronics, kitchen items, tools, lawn and garden items, toys & games, baby products, apparel, sporting goods, gourmet food, jewelry, watches, health and personal-care items, beauty products, musical instruments, clothing, industrial & scientific supplies, groceries, and more.
Beginning August 2005, Amazon began selling products under its own private label, "Pinzon"; the initial trademark applications suggested the company intended to focus on textiles, kitchen utensils, and other household goods. In March 2007, the company applied to expand the trademark to cover a larger and more diverse list of goods, and to register a new design consisting of the "word PINZON in stylized letters with a notched letter O whose space appears at the "one o'clock" position.". The list of products registered for coverage by the trademark grew to include items such as paints, carpets, wallpaper, hair accessories, clothing, footwear, headgear, cleaning products, and jewelry.
On May 16, 2007 Amazon announced its intention to launch its own online music store. The store launched in the US in public beta September 25, 2007, selling downloads exclusively in MP3 format without digital rights management. This is especially notable as it was the first online offering of DRM-free music from all four major record companies.
In 2008 Amazon expanded into film production and is currently funding the film "The Stolen Child" with 20th Century Fox.
The Amazon Website
Amazon.com's customer reviews are monitored for all negative or indecent comments that are directed at anything, or anyone, but the product itself. In regards to the reviews lacking relative restrictions, Robert Spector, who is the author of the book Amazon.com, describes how "when publishers and authors asked Bezos why Amazon.com would publish negative reviews, he defended the practice by claiming that Amazon.com was ‘taking a different approach...we want to make every book available – the good, the bad, and the ugly...to let truth loose’". Reviews for different media of the same product are grouped together (e.g., the review page for a particular film, whether on VHS, Blu-Ray, or DVD, will feature reviews from all three products). Currently, there is no way to only look at reviews for one version of a product.
The domain amazon.com attracted at least 615 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey. This was twice the numbers of walmart.com.
Search Inside the Book" is a feature which allows customers to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the catalog. The feature started with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003. There are currently about 250,000 books in the program. Amazon has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform these searches.
To avoid copyright violations, Amazon.com does not return the computer-readable text of the book but rather a picture of the matching page, disables printing, and puts limits on the number of pages in a book a single user can access. One author observed that his entire book could be read online by searching a few words. Additionally, customers can purchase online access to the same books via the "Amazon Upgrade" program, although the selection is currently quite limited.
According to information in Amazon.com discussion forums, Amazon derives about 40 percent of its sales from affiliates whom they call Associates, and third party sellers who list and sell products on the Amazon websites. Associates receive a commission for referring customers to Amazon by placing links on their websites to the Amazon homepage or to specific products. If a referral results in a sale, the Associate receives a commission from Amazon, so click on one of Amazon's banners on this website! Worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs. Associates can access the Amazon catalog directly on their websites by using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) XML service. A new affiliate product, aStore, allows Associates to embed a subset of Amazon products within, or linked to from, another website.
Amazon reported over 1.3 million sellers sold products through Amazon's World Wide Web sites in 2007. Selling on Amazon has become more popular as Amazon expanded into a variety of categories beyond media and built a variety of features to support volume selling. Unlike eBay, Amazon sellers do not have to maintain separate payment accounts; all payments and payment security are handled by Amazon itself.
According to the Internet audience measurement website Compete.com, Amazon attracts approximately 50 million U.S. consumers to its website on a monthly basis.
Acquisitions
In April 1998, Amazon bought the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
In August 1998, Amazon bought Cambridge, Massachusetts-based PlanetAll for 800,000 shares of Amazon stock. PlanetAll operated a web-based address book, calendar, and reminder service. In the same deal, Amazon acquired Sunnyvale-based Junglee.com, an XML-based data mining startup for 1.6 million shares of Amazon stock. The two deals together were valued at about $280 million at the time.
In June 1999, Amazon bought Alexa Internet, Accept.com, and Exchange.com in a set of stock deals worth approximately $645 million.
In 2003, Amazon purchased the rival online music retailer CD Now, not to be confused with our other affiliate partner CDWow.
In 2004, Amazon purchased Joyo.com, a Chinese e-commerce website. It also debuted A9.com, a company focused on researching and building innovative technology.
In March 2005, Amazon acquired BookSurge, a print on demand company, and Mobipocket.com, an eBook software company.
In July 2005, Amazon purchased CreateSpace (formerly CustomFlix), a Scotts Valley, California-based distributor of on-demand DVDs. Since the acquisition, CreateSpace has expanded its on-line services to include on-demand books and CDs, as well as video downloads. On July 30, 2007, the National Archives announced that it would make thousands of historic films available for purchase through CreateSpace.
In February 2006, Amazon acquired Shopbop, a Madison, Wisconsin-based retailer of designer clothing and accessories for women.
In May 2007, Amazon acquired dpreview.com, a London-based digital photography review website created by Phil Askey as his personal hobby website and Brilliance Audio, the largest independent publisher of audiobooks in the United States.
In January 2008, Amazon announced that it would acquire audiobook provider Audible.com for $300 million in cash.
In June 2008, Amazon announced that it had acquired Fabric.com, an online fabric store.
In July 2008, Amazon's IMDb subsidiary purchased Box Office Mojo, a site that tracks movie sales in theatres.
In August 2008, Amazon announced it had an agreement to purchase Victoria, B.C. based AbeBooks, seller of new, used, out of print and rare books. Later that month Amazon announced that it would acquire Seattle-based Shelfari, a book-based social network site, for an undisclosed sum. As part of its acquisition of Abebooks Amazon also got an additional stake in Shelfari's competitor LibraryThing, which AbeBooks had previously purchased a 40 percent stake in, and whole ownership of Bookfinder.com, Gojaba.com, and listing-management service FillZ, all owned by AbeBooks at the time of acquisition.
