mazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is a US-based multinational electronic commerce company.

Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is often called the world's largest online retailer.[3] Amazon has websites and delivery for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Japan, and China. Launches in Netherlands, Sweden, and India may follow.[4] It also provides international shipping to certain countries for some of its products. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and the site went online in 1995.[5] It is named after the Amazon River, one of the largest rivers in the world.[5] Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys.

Contents
[hide]

1 History o 1.1 Acquisitions o 1.2 Investments o 1.3 Subsidiaries 2 Merchant partnerships 3 Locations o 3.1 Headquarters o 3.2 Software development centers o 3.3 Fulfillment and warehousing o 3.4 Closed fulfillment, warehousing & customer service locations 4 Products and services o 4.1 Amazon Web Services o 4.2 Amazon Prime o 4.3 Amazon Publishing o 4.4 Subscribe & Save o 4.5 AmazonBasics o 4.6 Other services o 4.7 Amazon.com exclusives 5 Website o 5.1 Reviews o 5.2 Content search o 5.3 Third-party sellers 6 Amazon sales rank 7 Controversies o 7.1 Sales and use taxes 8 Lobbying 9 Entrepreneurship by former employees 10 See also 11 References 12 Further reading 13 External links

[edit] History

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com Amazon was founded in 1995,[6] spurred by what Bezos called "regret minimization framework", his effort to fend off regret for not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush.[7] Company lore says Bezos wrote the business plan while he and his wife drove from New York to Seattle,[8] although that account is disputed. Bezos flew from New York to Texas, where he picked up a car from a family member, and then drove from Texas to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore;[9] while the largest brick-and-mortar bookstores and mail-order catalogs for books might offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could offer more. Bezos wanted a name for his company that began with "A" so that it would appear first in lists, like in phone books.[5] He began looking through the dictionary and settled on "Amazon" because it was a place that was "exotic and different" and the river he considered the biggest in the world, like he hoped his company would be.[5] Since 2000, Amazon's logotype is an arrow leading from A to Z, representing customer satisfaction (as it forms a smile); a goal was to have every product in the alphabet.[10] Amazon was incorporated in 1994, in the state of Washington. In July 1995, the company began service and sold its first book on amazon.com - Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.[11] In 1996, it was reincorporated in Delaware. Amazon issued its initial public offering of stock on May 15, 1997, trading under the NASDAQ stock exchange symbol AMZN, at an IPO price of US$18.00 per share ($1.50 after three stock splits in the late 1990s). Amazon's initial business plan was unusual: the company did not expect a profit for four to five years. Its "slow" growth provoked stockholder complaints that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough. When the dot-com bubble burst, and many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered, and finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million or 1 per share, on revenues of more than $1 billion, but the modest profit was important in demonstrating the business model could be profitable. In 1999, Time magazine named Bezos Person of the Year, recognizing the company's success in popularizing online shopping.

Barnes and Noble filed a lawsuit on 12 May 1997, alleging that Amazon's claim to be "The world's largest bookstore" was false. They asserted "[It] isn't a bookstore at all. It's a book broker." The suit was later settled out of court. Amazon continued to call itself "The world's largest bookstore."[12] This was followed by Walmart filing suit on 16 October 1998, alleging that Amazon had stolen trade secrets by hiring former Walmart executives. Although this suit was settled out of court, it led to work restrictions and reassignment of the former Walmart executives.[12]