Jeff Bezos had founded Amazon in July 1994 but according to a history website, the company officially opened for business on 16th July 1995 as an online bookseller.
Earlier, Bezos had gotten his friends and former colleagues together to see his early version of the Amazon website. One of them placed the first official order on the website on 3rd April 1995 for the book, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.
Bezos had opened the business in Seattle because it was within close proximity to Microsoft’s office. The company had a good start and within one month it had shipped books to all US 50 states and 45 countries. Amazon made a revenue of $15.7 million in 1997.
It was not until May 1997 before Amazon became a public company with its shares openly traded in the stock exchange. By 1998, three years after it had started as a bookseller, Amazon was selling music and videos.
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It also began making big moves in 1998 by buying other online booksellers as far as the UK and Germany. Then it introduced video game sales as well as consumer electronics. Toys, home electronics and tools also followed.
Soon the company was no more an online bookseller but a major shopping website. Amazon had crossed the mark of 20 million shipped items by the end of 1999 and it had customers in 150 countries.
In 2000 it started allowing third-party sellers to use its platform for sales as well. With the launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002, the company was priming itself as not just a marketplace but a technology company. AWS started as a statistics platform that gave marketers and developers such insights as website popularity, Internet traffic patterns and so on.
However, it kept focusing on its original business of selling books. It introduced Kindle e-reader in 2007 and Kindle Fire, a tablet device for reading e-books in 2011. By 2015, Amazon was the most valuable retailer toppling Walmart’s domination.
Its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world in 2017 for the first time. In 2019, Amazon generated a revenue of $280.522 billion and over 840,400 employees.
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