(Amazon.com, Seattle, WA, www.amazon.com) The largest online shopping site in the U.S. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, within four years, Amazon had more than four million customers. Today, more than 100 million visitors access the site each month. Amazon's well-designed website made it easy to order merchandise (see
one-click ordering).
From a Bookstore to Nearly Everything
Amazon started out as an online bookstore, constantly making news with its product volume. In the late 1990s, after adding CDs, videos, DVDs and games, Amazon offered more than four million titles. It continued to add new lines of business including toys, consumer electronics, software, power tools, home improvement products, online auctions and cloud computing services, the latter a significant profit center for the company (see
Amazon Web Services).
In 2000, Amazon opened its e-commerce platform to non-Amazon vendors. Similar to Apple opening up its iPhone platform to third-party developers, Amazon acquired millions of sellers. Today, nearly every legal product that can be shipped is available on Amazon's site (see
Fulfillment by Amazon).
Amazon Prime Membership
In 2005, Amazon Prime was introduced as an annual subscription. Prime offers free one-day and two-day shipping on most products Amazon stocks in its warehouses. Prime membership increasingly offers other benefits, including unlimited video and music streaming, photo storage and e-book lending (Prime Video, Amazon Music, Amazon Photos and Kindle eBooks). See
AmazonFresh and
Amazon Go.
Amazon's Own Products
In the late 2000s, the company began to offer Amazon-branded items, including e-book readers, tablets, smartphones, cables and other devices (see
Kindle,
Fire tablet,
Fire Phone,
Amazon Echo and
Amazon Dash).