OVERVIEW
Amazon.com strives to be Earth's most customer-centric company where people can find and discover virtually anything they want to buy online. By giving customers more of what they want - low prices, vast selection, and convenience - Amazon.com continues to grow and evolve as a world-class e-commerce platform.
Founded by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com website started in 1995 as a place to buy books because of the unique customer experience the Web could offer book lovers. Bezos believed that only the Internet could offer customers the convenience of browsing a selection of millions of book titles in a single sitting. During the first 30 days of business, Amazon.com fulfilled orders for customers in 50 states and 45 countries - all shipped from his Seattle-area garage.
It is by design that technological innovation drives the growth of Amazon.com to offer customers more types of products, more conveniently, and at even lower prices. Among its many technological innovations for customers, Amazon.com offers a personalized shopping experience for each customer, book discovery through "Search Inside The Book", convenient checkout using "1-Click® Shopping", and several community features like Listmania (www.amazon.com/listmania) and Wish Lists (www.amazon.com/wishlists) that help customers discover new products and make informed buying decisions.
Amazon.com operates retail websites and offers programs that enable third parties to sell products on our
websites. Our retail websites include: www.amazon.com · www.amazon.ca · www.amazon.cn · www.amazon.de · www.amazon.fr · www.amazon.co.jp · www.amazon.co.uk · www.shopbop.com and www.endless.com. We also provide services for third-party retailers, marketing and promotional services, and web services for developers. In addition, we operate other websites, including www.a9.com and www.alexa.com that enable search and
navigation and www.imdb.com, a comprehensive movie database.
In 2000, Amazon.com began to offer its best-of-breed e-commerce platform to other retailers and to individual sellers. Today, hundreds of thousands of world-class retail brands and individual sellers increase their sales and reach new customers by leveraging the power of the Amazon.com e-commerce platform. Through programs such as Marketplace, Advantage, and by working with Amazon.com subsidiary Amazon Services, sellers of all shapes and sizes offer their selection to Amazon.com customers by using various components of the e-commerce platform. Partners such as Benefit Cosmetics, bebe and Sears.ca work with Amazon Services to power their e-commerce offering from end-to-end, including technology services, merchandising, customer service, and order fulfillment. Other branded merchants such as Macy's and Lands' End leverage Amazon.com as an incremental sales channel for their new merchandise. Smaller sellers participate in Amazon Marketplace where they offer new, used and collectible selections at fixed prices to Amazon customers around the world.
Amazon Web Services (www.amazon.com/aws) provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.
Amazon's evolution from Web site to e-commerce partner to development platform is driven by the spirit of innovation that is part of the company's DNA. The world's brightest technology minds come to Amazon.com to research and develop technology that improves the lives of shoppers, sellers and developers around the world.
