Often simply Amazon, is an American electronic commerce and cloud computingcompany, founded in July 5, 1994 by Jeff Bezos and based in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the world by total sales and market capitalization.Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, later diversifying to sell DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, video downloads/streaming, MP3downloads/streaming, audiobookdownloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and jewelry. The company also produces consumer electronics—notably, Amazon Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, and Fire TV—and is the world’s largest provider of cloud infrastructure services ( IaaS) .Amazon also sells certain low-end products like USB cables under its in-house brand AmazonBasics.
Amazon has separate retail websites for the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India and Mexico. Amazon also offers international shipping to certain other countries for some of its products. In 2016, Dutch and Polish language versions of the German Amazon website were launched.
In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization, and is, as of 2016 Q3, the fourth most valuable public company.The company was founded in 1994, spurred by what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called his regret minimization framework, which described his efforts to fend off any regrets for not participating sooner in the Internet business boom during that time. In 1994, Bezos left his employment as vice-president of D. E. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and moved to Seattle. He began to work on a business plan for what would eventually become Amazon.com.
Jeff Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra on July 5, 1994.Bezos changed the name to Amazon a year later after a lawyer misheard its original name as cadaver.In September 1994, Bezos purchased the URL Relentless.com and briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, but friends told him the name sounded a bit sinister. The domain is still owned by Bezos and still redirects to the retailer. The company went online as Amazon.com in 1995.
Bezos selected the name Amazon by looking through the dictionary, and settled on Amazon because it was a place that was exotic and different just as he planned for his store to be; the Amazon river, he noted was by far the biggest river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest in the world.Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand, telling a reporter, There’s nothing about our model that can’t be copied over time. But you know, McDonald’s got copied. And it still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world.Additionally, a name beginning with A was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of any list that was alphabetized.