Amazon.com | History & Facts
Amazon.com, online retailer, manufacturer of electronic book readers, and Web services provider that became the iconic example of electronic commerce. Its headquarters are in Seattle, Washington.
Amazon.com is a vast Internet-based enterprise that sells books, music, movies, housewares, electronics, toys, and many other goods, either directly or as the middleman between other retailers and Amazon.com’s millions of customers. Its Web services business includes renting data storage and computing resources, so-called “cloud computing,” over the Internet. Its considerable online presence is such that, in 2012, 1 percent of all Internet traffic in North America traveled in and out of Amazon.com data centres.
Kindle
The company also makes the market-leading Kindle e-book readers. Its promotion of these devices has led to dramatic growth in e-book publishing and turned Amazon.com into a major disruptive force in the book-publishing market.
“Get Big Fast”
In 1994 Jeff Bezos, a former Wall Street hedge fund executive, incorporated Amazon.com, choosing the name primarily because it began with the first letter of the alphabet and because of its association with the vast South American river. On the basis of research he had conducted, Bezos concluded that books would be the most logical product initially to sell online. Amazon.com was not the first company to do so; Computer Literacy, a Silicon Valley bookstore, began selling books from its inventory to its technically astute customers in 1991. However, the promise of Amazon.com was to deliver any book to any reader anywhere.
While Amazon.com famously started as a bookseller, Bezos contended from its start that the site was not merely a retailer of consumer products. He argued that Amazon.com was a technology company whose business was simplifying online transactions for consumers.
The Amazon.com business strategy was often met with skepticism. Financial journalists and analysts disparaged the company by referring to it as Amazon.bomb. Doubters claimed Amazon.com ultimately would lose in the marketplace to established bookselling chains, such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, once they had launched competing e-commerce sites. The lack of company profits until the final quarter of 2001 seemed to justify its critics.
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However, Bezos dismissed naysayers as not understanding the massive growth potential of the Internet. He argued that to succeed as an online retailer, a company needed to “Get Big Fast,” a slogan he had printed on employee T-shirts. In fact, Amazon.com did grow fast, reaching 180,000 customer accounts by December 1996, after its first full year in operation, and less than a year later, in October 1997, it had 1,000,000 customer accounts. Its revenues jumped from $15.7 million in 1996 to $148 million in 1997, followed by $610 million in 1998. Amazon.com’s success propelled its founder to become Time magazine’s 1999 Person of the Year.
The company expanded rapidly in other areas. Its Associates program, where other Web sites could offer merchandise for sale and Amazon.com would fill the order and pay a commission, grew from one such site in 1996 to more than 350,000 by 1999. Following Bezos’s initial strategy, the company quickly began selling more than books. Music and video sales started in 1998. That same year it began international operations with the acquisition of online booksellers in the United Kingdom and Germany. By 1999 the company was also selling consumer electronics, video games, software, home-improvement items, toys and games, and much more.
To sustain that growth, Amazon.com needed more than private investors to underwrite the expansion. As a result, in May 1997, less than two years after opening its virtual doors to consumers and without ever having made a profit, Amazon.com became a public company, raising $54 million on the NASDAQ market. In addition to the cash, the company was able to use its high-flying stock to fund its aggressive growth and acquisition strategy.
Although offering more types of goods broadened its appeal, it was Amazon.com’s service that gained it customer loyalty and ultimate profitability. Its personalization tools recommended other products to buy on the basis of both a customer’s purchasing history and data from buyers of the same items. Its publishing of customer reviews of products fostered a “community of consumers” who helped each other find everything from the right book to the best blender.
Beyond retailing
As noted above, Bezos claimed that Amazon.com was not a retailer but a technology company. To underscore the point, in 2002 the company launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), which initially offered data on Internet traffic patterns, Web site popularity, and other statistics for developers and marketers. In 2006 the company expanded its AWS portfolio with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which rents out computer processing power in small or large increments. That same year, the Simple Storage Service (S3), which rents data storage over the Internet, became available.
S3 and EC2 quickly succeeded and helped popularize the idea that companies and individuals do not need to own computing resources; they can rent them as needed over the Internet, or “in the cloud.” For example, in 2007, soon after launch, the S3 service contained more than 10 billion objects, or files; five years later, it held more than 905 billion. AWS is even used by Amazon.com’s rivals, such as Netflix, which uses both S3 and EC2 for its competing video streaming service.
When Bezos founded Amazon.com, the strategy was to not carry any inventory. However, in order to achieve more control over deliveries, in 1997 the company began holding inventory in its warehouses. In 2000 the company started a service that lets small companies and individuals sell their products through Amazon.com, and by 2006 it had started its Fulfillment by Amazon service that managed the inventory of such business. Its growing inventory-management business spurred its $775 million purchase in 2012 of Kiva Systems, a robotics company whose devices automate inventory-fulfillment duties.
Nevertheless, despite having branched out well beyond online retailing, the bulk of the company’s revenues continues to come through selling products online (though its most profitable division remains AWS), and that is where much of its investment has been targeted. Over the years it has acquired or invested in many online retailers, such as the shoe seller Zappos, which it purchased for $847 million in 2009.
The
Kindle shakes up publishing
Kindle 2
In 2007 Amazon.com began to sell its own Kindle e-readers, which helped energize the e-book market. In 2011 the company introduced a related low-cost tablet computer, the Kindle Fire, and by 2012, the Kindle Fire was estimated to constitute 50 percent of the tablets sold that used Google’s Android mobile operating system.
After its first full year of selling books in 1996, book publishers praised the new service as a great way to help them clear their backlists of slow-selling books. However, with the introduction of the Kindle, tensions began to build between publishers and Amazon.com. The company wanted to sell new e-books for a fixed price, well below what new printed books sold for, prompting many complaints from the publishing industry.
By 2010 the rift between book publishers and Amazon.com over the price of e-books had grown. The publishing company Macmillan Books threatened to pull its e-books from Amazon.com, which retaliated by removing all Macmillan books, both printed and electronic, from the site. However, within weeks, Amazon.com capitulated and allowed Macmillan and other publishers to set prices of e-books.
In 2009 the company introduced its first publishing line, AmazonEncore, dedicated to popular self-published and out-of-print books. It also let individuals publish their own e-books. In 2011 its e-book ambitions led to the launch of Amazon Publishing with the intent to develop and publish its own titles. That year Amazon.com announced that Kindle e-books were outselling all printed books. While many book publishers continue to derive significant revenue through sales at Amazon.com, the company is no longer considered by publishers merely as another bookseller. It is now also a major competitor in their industry.
Mark Hall
In 2017 Amazon.com announced that it had agreed to buy the supermarket chain Whole Foods Market, Inc., in a deal valued at more than $13 billion.
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