What is Amazon?

Amazon SL (limited partnership) is a company originating from the USA, its main market is e-commerce along with cloud computing services.

Its headquarters are city ​​of seattle in the US state of Washington. Amazon was one of the first companies to offer and sell goods on the internet on a large scale and its motto is "From A to Z" (From A to Z)

It has managed to establish completely independent websites for many markets in which it is present around the world such as

• Germany
• Austria
• France
• China
• Japan
• United States
• UK and Ireland
• Canada, Australia
• Italy
• Spain
• Netherlands
• Brazil
• India
• Mexico

In this way, this company is able to offer the specific products of each of those countries. In other countries where Amazon is also present, it performs technical support functions, such as Costa Rica, since it is there from where centralizes its attention to customers throughout Latin America being one of the largest companies in this country with a workforce of no less than 7.500 employees.

Amazon is the world's largest online retail company, where you can find practically anything you need as it is very sure that someone is selling it.

The Amazon company was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos after leaving his previous job as vice president of DE Shaw & Co. in the same year, that company was a major Wall Street firm.

After his resignation, Bezos decided to move to Seattle and it was there that he began the structuring of a specialized business plan through the Internet, which over time became what we all now know as the Amazon.com company.

How the idea for Amazon was born

The founder of Amazon, being a Wall Street insider, after reading a report that analyzed the internet market and its future, discovered that it was projected an annual growth of 2.300% in web commerce.

After knowing this, he decided to create a small list of products that he thought would be sold very fast and very easy to market through the internet with what he obtained a list of only 20 products but it was still a very long list so he continued working on it to reduce it to 5 possible successful products for the business that he was looking for.

In the end, after an exhaustive search and selection, he decided that the perfect business model for what he was looking for would be books since the worldwide demand for literature was enormous.

This decision was a complete success  thanks to the low prices of the books that it offered added to the enormous quantity of literary titles that it had in stock

The Amazon bookstore managed to achieve such a success that only in the first two months of life. The business sold to more than 45 countries various including the United States. His sales were up to $ 20.000 a week.

Variety of names before Amazon

The interesting thing is that Amazon was not really called that from its origins, had several names for different reasons before Jeff Bezos arrived at the one we all recognize without hesitation today.

When Bezos created the company in 1994, he created it under the name of “cadaver"But he had to change this name after a lawyer was confused with" corpse ", in that same year, he acquired the URL domain"Relentless.com”So the company had for a not very long period of time (not more than a year) that name online but the founder's friends convinced him that such a name was not so appropriate or flashy for his company as it sounded like, According to this, somewhat sinister so Bezos, taking the word from a dictionary, decided to opt for the name of Amazon.

Why Amazon?

Jeff Bezos chose this name because the Amazonas is an immense, exotic and very different place to what is known to man and he wanted his store to fit that description as well, the largest river in the world is the Amazon river and he wanted his store to be the largest online store in the world.

Amazon logo

As of June 19, 2000, the Amazon logo has been or has been featured with the word more a curved arrow that appears to be a big smile, This line intertwines two specific letters: "a" and "z", which perfectly represents in image and without equivocation, its motto, which wants to imply that the store has everything you can search from "a "To" z "

Timeline and First business model

As we have already mentioned, Amazon was created in the year 1994, in Washington state, The company sells his first book in 1995, By October 1995, Amazon was announced to the public.

En 1996, it is decided to reincorporate in Delaware.

Amazon launches its initial public offering of shares on May 15, 1997 and while trading under the NASDAQ stock symbol AMZN, the company's stock at the time was trading at a price of $ 18 for each share.

The business plan that Amazon decided to go for in the beginning was completely unusual and unexpected. The company did not expect to make a profit until four or five years later, and because of this kind of "slow" growth, shareholders began to complain that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough to justify its investment and even that it was fit for long-term survival.

Amazon survived the turn of the century and all the problems that this represented, growing to become a huge website in online sales.

In the end, made its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001 That was $ 5 million, meaning the stock price was at 1 cent, with revenue easily exceeding $ XNUMX billion.

When this small but encouraging profit margin began to be seen, it proved to the skeptics that Jeff's unconventional business model could be predicted to be successful.

For year 1999, Time magazine recognized Jeff Bezos as the person of the year, thereby recognizing the great success of the company.

New business models

But Amazon.com never settled for the model it found, so it announced on October 11, 2016 its plans to build brick-and-mortar stores and develop curbside collection points for food.

This new business model was called "Amazon Go”(Amazon to go), opened to Amazon employees in Seattle in 2016.

This new shop relies on the use of a variety of sensors and can automatically load an Amazon shopper account as they leave the store, there are no checkout lines.

Although it took a long time, the store finally opened to the general public on January 22, 2018.

Demands

But not everything was as simple as it seems, there were other incidents such as Barnes & Noble suing Amazon on May 12, 1997, alleging that Amazon's claim: "The largest bookstore in the world" was a fallacy, the plaintiff stated: «It is not a bookstore at all, is a book agent ».

Then it was the turn of Walmart who sued Amazon on October 16, 1998, this group alleged that Amazon had stolen its trade secrets as it had hired former Walmart executives.

Both problems were solved by means of settlements out of court.

And today Amazon

It's a cool and lucrative business model, what did he do twenty years old on May 15, 2017 since it started trading on the Nasdaq.

El Amazon's market value is estimated to be close to $ 460.000 billion, thus allowing it to be placed as the fourth largest and most successful company in the S&P 500 (Standard & Poor's 500) index, located right between the companies Microsoft and Facebook.

Amazon's customer base developed during the decade from 2000 to 2010 reaching 30 million people.

Amazon.com is characterized as a retail site primarily with a sales revenue model.

Amazon.com's earnings come from charging a percentage of the total sale price of each item that is placed and offered within your website.

Amazon currently allows companies to advertise their products by paying their fees to be listed as products.

Amazon also owns:

• Alexa Internet
• a9.com
• Shoppop
• Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
• Zappos.com
• dpreview.com