Amazon, Inc. (Amazon for short), is the largest e-commerce company in the United States. It is located in Seattle, Washington, and is one of the earliest companies to start e-commerce business. Amazon was founded in 1995. At the beginning, it only operated e-commerce business of books. Now it has expanded to sell a wide range of other products. It has become the online retailer with the most varieties of goods in the world and the second largest Internet company in the world. It has subsidiaries such as AlexaInternet, A9, lab126, and Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

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About Amazon

In the United States alone, Amazon has more than 150 million unique visitors per month.

Amazon and other sellers offer customers millions of unique new, refurbished and used items, including books, movies, music and games, digital downloads, electronics and computers, home and garden products, toys, baby products, food, apparel, shoes and jewelry, health and personal care products, sports and outdoor products, toys, automobiles and industrial products, etc.

Company Development

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 16, 1995, and was initially called Cadabra. Its nature was basically an online bookstore. However, the visionary Bezos saw the potential and characteristics of the Internet. When a large physical bookstore provides 200,000 books, an online bookstore can provide readers with more choices than 200,000 books.

Bezos renamed Cadabra after the Amazon River, which is home to the most species of life on Earth, and reopened it in July 1995. The company was originally registered in Washington State in 1994, and changed its registration to Delaware in 1996. Its stock was listed on May 15, 1997. The code is AMZN, and the price of one share is $18 (as of the close of October 12, 2012, the stock price was $242.36).

Positioning change

First transformation: Becoming the “world’s largest bookstore” (1994-1997)

In the summer of 1994, Bezos, who resigned from the financial services company DEShaw, decided to start an online bookstore. Bezos believed that books were the most common commodities with a high degree of standardization; and the US book market was large, which was very suitable for starting a business. After about a year of preparation, the Amazon website was officially launched in July 1995. In order to compete with offline book giants Barnes & Noble and Borders, Bezos positioned Amazon as "Earth's biggest bookstore". To achieve this goal, Amazon adopted a large-scale expansion strategy, exchanging huge losses for business scale. After running fast, it took Amazon less than two years from the launch of the website to the listing of the company. When Barnes & Noble launched online shopping in May 1997, Amazon had already established a huge advantage in online book retail. After several confrontations between Amazon and Barnes & Noble, Amazon finally fully established its position as the largest bookstore.

Second transformation: Becoming the largest comprehensive online retailer (1997-2001)

Bezos believes that compared with physical stores, an important advantage of online retail is that it can provide consumers with a richer selection of goods. Therefore, expanding the website categories and building a comprehensive e-commerce to form economies of scale have become Amazon's strategic considerations. Amazon went public in May 1997, and before it had completely established an absolute dominant position in the online book retail market, Amazon began to expand its product categories. After the initial supply and market promotion, Amazon's music store was officially launched in June 1998. In just one quarter, the sales of Amazon's music store exceeded CDnow, becoming the largest online music product retailer. Since then, Amazon has expanded its categories and internationally. By 2000, Amazon's slogan had been changed to "the Internet's No. 1 retailer."

The third transformation: Becoming the “most customer-centric company” (2001-present)

In 2001, in addition to promoting itself as the largest online retailer, Amazon also established the goal of being "the world's most customer-centric company". Since then, building a customer-centric service-oriented enterprise has become Amazon's development direction. To this end, Amazon began to promote the third-party open platform (marketplace) on a large scale in 2001, launched network services (AWS) in 2002, launched Prime services in 2005, began to provide outsourced logistics services to third-party sellers Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) in 2007, and launched the self-service digital publishing platform Digital Text Platform (DTP), the predecessor of KDP, in 2010. Amazon gradually launched these services, allowing it to go beyond the scope of online retailers and become a comprehensive service provider.

Acquisitions

In April 1998, Amazon acquired IMDb (Internet Movie Database).

In August 1998, Amazon acquired Junglee (a data mining company) for $186 million.

In August 1998, Amazon acquired Planetall (a social networking company) for $93 million.

In June 1999, Amazon acquired Alexa for $250 million;

In April 2003, Amazon acquired its online music store competitor en: CD Now;

In August 2004, Amazon acquired China's Joyo.com (which was then an online bookstore) for $75 million.

In July 2005, Amazon acquired CustomFlix (DVD producer);

In February 2006, Amazon acquired Shopbop (a women's fashion shopping website);

In May 2007, Amazon acquired Dpreview (a digital camera review website);

In March 2008, Amazon acquired Audible (an audiobook website) for $300 million.

In July 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos (online shoe store) for $1.2 billion;

In June 2010, Amazon acquired Woot (a group buying website) for $110 million.

In November 2010, Amazon acquired Quidsi for $550 million;

In July 2011, Amazon acquired The Book Depository (online bookstore);

In 2011, Amazon also acquired Lovefilm and Pushbutton;

In March 2012, Amazon acquired the automation robotics company Kiva Systems;

On April 11, 2014, Amazon acquired the digital comics company comiXology;

On May 16, 2014, Amazon announced a $20 million investment in Shanghai Delicious 77, launching its fresh food strategy in the Chinese market.

On August 26, 2014, Amazon announced that it would acquire the video game streaming service Twitch for $970 million in cash;

In March 2017, Amazon acquired the Middle Eastern e-commerce platform Souq.com for $580 million;

In June 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods for $13.4 billion.