Amazon.com

Amazon.com is a leading global internet company. It was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, and was online by 1995. At first, Amazon.com was an online bookstore, although that quickly changed to add music, clothing, computer software, and more, which can hold many times more than what a typical bookstore can hold. The first book to be sold on Amazon, in July 1995, was Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

In 1994, Bezos moved to Seattle where he began to work on a business plan that would eventually become Amazon.com. He wrote up a list of twenty products that could be sold on the internet after reading a report projecting the annual web growth at 2300%. He narrowed the list down to CDs, computer hardware, computer software, videos, and books, and finally decided on selling books over the web for three reasons: the large market for literature, the low price that books could be sold at, and the enormous amount of books that were available for print. He chose Seattle to be the location for the headquarters because of its high tech work force and the proximity to a book distribution center. Bezos decided on the name “Amazon” because he wanted it to be one of the first things to appear when listed alphabetically. It is also an “exotic and different” place, as well as one of the largest rivers in the world, something he hoped his company would live up to. They seek to offer the biggest selection and to be the most customer-centric company, where customers can find anything they would want to buy online.

After just four months, it was recognized as the sixth best site on Point Communication's “Top Ten” list and was placed on Yahoo's “what's cool list” and Netscape's “what's new list.” Customers were able to search for an item from the company's homepage they would be shown the desired titles from the company database. However, Amazon.com only had about 2000 titles in its warehouse. Most of the orders were placed through wholesalers and publishers, diminishing the need for a warehouse. Initially, Amazon.com was run in Bezos' garage, until it started growing, making it necessary to move to an office in Seattle. This office was also used as the customer support, shipping, and receiving area. Within a month of launching the website, orders from all 50 states as well as 45 other countries had been filled.

One of Bezos' goals for Amazon.com was to set the standard for web businesses, leading to him making the website as customer friendly as possible. It offered customers powerful search capabilities of its expanded 1.5 million title database. They also started offering discounts, making the books even more affordable. The option to browse different topics was also made available to customers, as well as more specific areas, such as best-sellers and award winners. Recommendations were another addition to the site, based on previously purchased books by the customer.

By May 1997, Amazon.com was a public company with an IPO (initial public offering) of three million shares of common stock. Bezos began improving the website further with the proceeds from the IPO. In September 1997, an East Coast distribution center was opened in order to lessen the strain on the one in Seattle and to help broaden the company's distribution capabilities. The Seattle center was also majorly expanded. These efforts reduced the time it took to fill orders. In July 1996, Amazon.com established the “Associates” program, which allowed people with their own websites to place ads for books on their sites. By mid-1997, Amazon.com created partnerships with Yahoo, Inc. and America Online, two of the most visited sites, who gave Amazon.com broad promotional capabilities of their sites, thus really launching the Associates program. Around this time was also when Amazon.com became the first online retailer to reach one million customers in all 50 states and 160 countries around the world. In 1998, Amazon.com Advantage, which helped the sales of independent authors and publishers, and Amazon.com Kids, which provided thousands of titles for younger readers, were added. They also expanded into Europe. IMD (the Internet Movie Database) was used to support plans for its move into online video sales. Another huge improvement was the introduction to the online music business. The music store was opened in 1998, offering over 125,000 music titles.

Online auction services were introduced in 1999, as were the sales of toys and electronics. Around that holiday season, sales reached $1.6 billion. This was also the year that Bezos was named Time magazine's “Person of the Year.” In 2001 however, Amazon.com laid off 1300 employees and closed a distribution facility in order to cut costs. This was also around the time that other retailers, such as Borders and Toys R Us, were selling products through Amazon.com.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) was launched in 2006, allowing people to store up to 5 terabytes of data, as was Amazon Simple Queue Service (a distributed queue messaging service) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (a virtual site farm). Amazon Prime was offered starting in 2005 in the US, 2007 in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, which offers two day shipping with no extra charge, and access to instant streaming of movies and TV shows as of November 2011.

Due to the extremely high traffic, especially during the holiday season, Amazon.com has invested on a massive amount of server capacity. As of 2008, amazon.com had more than 615 million visitors annually, nearly twice as many as others such as walmart.com. Customers can now submit reviews for each product. They can also search for key words within the text of certain books, but can only show that section of the book due to copyright policies.

Amazon.com has dealt, and is dealing, with many controversies, including health issues, bad warehouse conditions for workers, sales tax, price discrimination, and censorship of certain content. There has also been a lot of controversy with their “One Click” check-out patent, which was issued to them in 1999. In 2000, they licensed One Click check-out to Apple Computer. However, they filed a lawsuit against Barnes & Noble for using the One Click method. Barnes & Noble had to stop offering what they called “Express Lane,” and required customers to have to click twice in order to confirm their orders.

As of 2011, there are about 137 million active customers worldwide. North America representing 55.4% of sales, and the other 44.6% in the International market. They were one of the first to sell products in the “long-tail” because they store them in warehouses and distribute from partner companies. They also released a Mac download store, offering many pieces of software for Apple Computers.

We have all used Amazon.com. It is an extremely convenient and easy form of shopping for just about any item available, whether to find books for school, a gift for a friend or family member, or a simple household object. It lets customers to quickly search for an item and then returns a long list of items that may relate to the key words entered, ranging in prices and quality. This process is made even simpler by the use of one click check-out, allowing people to reduce the time it takes to go through the check-out process.

References:

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/amazon

http://www.essortment.com/history-amazoncom-21180.html

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Amazoncom-Inc-Company-History.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com

http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/companyprofiles/a/Amazon.htm