The History of Amazon

We all know that Amazon is the biggest retailer in the world. Amazon currently has a total of over 300 million different products that allow consumers to choose from. Today Amazon is the go-to site for online shoppers. You can buy almost everything on Amazon marketplace. How did Amazon become so big? Here is a brief of Amazon’s history.

Jeff Bezos was working at D.E Shaw & Co. as a vice-president. In 1994, he came across the statistic that World Wide Web usage was growing by 2,300 percent a month¹. Then he decided to leave his company and moved to Seattle to start an e-commerce company with a massive growth opportunity like the Internet. He initially named the company  Cadabra Inc. as in abracadabra, but he changed it when someone misheard it as cadaver. Then he came up with another name called relentless, but his friend told him that it sounded too sinister². He named the company Amazon after the Amazon River because it was massive monolithic and powerful. These qualities are what he wanted his business to have. Jeff Bezos’s first 5 e-commerce ideas were compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos and books. Eventually, he decided to focus on books due to the high demand for books. Within two months of launching Amazon, the company has sold books in 45 countries, and it was making over $20,000 per week³.

On May 15, 1997, Amazon debuted on NASDAQ going public at $18 per share. Jeff Bezos made a big decision to expand beyond books and started selling a little bit of everything in 1998. When the dot-com crash came, Amazon was one of the few start-ups that weren’t wiped out. The second most important decision that Jeff Bezos, made in 2005 was launching Amazon Prime, a membership service offing free two-day shipping within the United States on select products with an annual fee of $79.  The late 2000s were also an incredibly pivotal time for the company. Amazon launched a cloud computing service that hosted websites and applications for customers and other business called Amazon Web Service. In 2007, Amazon launched Amazon Fresh that allows consumers to receive their orders via Amazon Fresh on the same day or the next day. At the same time, Amazon had started to bet on multimedia services by releasing Amazon music. As of January 2020, Amazon Music had 55 million users globally⁴. Most importantly, Amazon Kindle was launched in 2007 that allowing consumers to read books via a device. Just three years later, e-book sales at Amazon had exceeded hardcover sales at the first time⁵. The inexpensive tablet Kindle Fire was released in 2011 but nothing compared to the Amazon Echo which launched in 2014 was the very first voice assistant that was actually well received. Amazon has made a record 101 acquisitions so far. Whole Foods is the largest acquisition at $13.7 billion which provides Amazon with a new and more frequent window to attract more customers. Through it all, it makes Amazon the world’s largest online retails and a successful company.

A fun fact:  if you type www.relentless.com on Google, you will find that it redirects you to amazon.com. Please leave in the comments below if you know anything interesting about Amazon.

References: 

¹Jeff Bezos. (2008, October 10). Entrepreneur. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/197608

²Stone,B. (2013). The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Little, Brown and Company.

³Spiro,J. (2009,October 23). The Great Leaders Series: Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com. Inc. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/30years/articles/jeff-bezos.html

⁴Rijo. (2020, February 2). Amazon Music has now 55 million listeners and tests audio ads. PPC. Land. Retrieved from https://ppc.land/amazon-music-has-now-55-million-listeners-and-tests-audio-ads/

⁵Miller,C. (2010, July 19). E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/technology/20kindle.html