The biggest internet-based company in today’s world is Amazon. In 1994 the company started selling books online and Jeff Bezos was determined that to succeed online the company needed to grow fast and big. The company sells a lot of things from shipping container houses to groceries. It is a one-stop-shop and it is future is great. Following outlines, the company’s milestones and why it became popular.
When Amazon was started and founded.
Amazon was incorporated by Jeff Bezos in July 2005, during this time he was a Wall Street hedge fund executive. It was to be called Cadabra but his lawyers advised him that the name was not suitable. This was because the name seemed obscure and people who heard the name over the phone misheard it to “Cadaver”. Bezos and his wife MacKenzie Tuttle registered the following domain for their potential new venture, Browser.com, Boomall.com, Awake.com, and Relentless.com. On searching the pages on a browser, you will be redirected to amazon.com. Finally, Bezos was able to come up with the word Amazon. He envisaged his online store as the biggest in the world the way Amazon is one of the large in the world. It is the reason why Amazon is known as an everything store. In 1994 the company was registered, and the name was sorted. Bezos settled on selling books online as they were easy to package, source, and distribute. Amazon wasn’t the only company in this industry. Computer Literacy also started selling its wares online in 1991. But Amazon was much convenient than Computer Literacy as it used to deliver goods or items directly to customers anyplace in the world. According to Bezos the plan was always to be more than just books. He also envisioned the company being a technology giant with its real business of making online transactions easier and simple for the consumer.
When it started selling other things rather than books.
Amazon started by selling books online and it was groundbreaking at that time as only a few companies were able to compete with Amazon. In 1998 Amazon.com started selling music and computer games. During the same year, it also expanded by acquiring other online bookstores in UK and Germany. By 2000 the company had expanded to selling video games, software, home improvement items, toys, consumer electronics, etc. In the mid-2000s, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) and it achieved Bezos’ goal of making it a tech company rather than being only an online retailer. It expanded its AWS with the inclusion of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). They also launched Simple Storage Service (S3) after the release of (EC2). The company’s revenue was significantly boosted with venturing into digital services e.g., EC2, and S3. The first Kindle e-readers were released in 2007 and by 2012 they would constitute around 50% of Android-operated tablet sales. In 2011 Amazon Publishing service was launched which saw the company entering the e-book publishing market. In 2012 it announced that e-book sales outsold the traditional printed books over its website. It has expanded in other services like drone delivery, shipping fresh produce, etc.
When Amazon became popular.
Most of the people disparaged the company by calling it Amazon. bomb. They claimed it would be taken over by more established bookstores. For example, the ones which were establishing their own e-commerce websites. Amazon.com wasn’t profitable until 2001 but Bezos had still had high expectations for the business. His argument was that for the company to be profitable it needed to get big fast and by December 1996 its customers had grown to 180,000. October 1997 the number had grown to 1,000,000 customers with registered accounts. Revenues hit $148 million in 1997 from $16 million in 1996. In 1999 Amazon launched the affiliate program and it grew to over 350,000 associates by the end of the same year.
