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Amazon.com(amazon.com)Amazon.com ( NASDAQ :AMZN) is an American electronic commerce companybased in Seattle , Washington . It was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet . Amazon owns Alexa Internet , a9.com , and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
Business modelFounded as Cadabra.com by Jeff Bezos in 1994 , the mainstream Internet's early days, the company began as an online bookstore . Bezos saw the potential of the Internet; while the largest brick-and-mortar bookstore might sellupwards of 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could sell many times more. Bezos renamed his company Amazon in deferenceto the world's most voluminous river, the Amazon . Amazon.com began servicein July 1995. The company was originally incorporated in 1994 in the state of Washington and was reincorporated in 1996 in Delaware . Amazon.com had its initial public offering on May 15 , 1997 , trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbolAMZN at an IPO price of $18.00 per share (equivalent to $1.50 today due to stock splits ). Amazon's initial business plan was unique, in that the company did notexpect to turn a profit for a good four to five years after it was founded. This strategy proved to be a sound one in the wake ofthe dotcom collapse of 2000 . Amazon grew at a steady pace in the late 1990s while other Internet companies appeared out of nowhere and grew at a blindinglyfast pace. Amazon's "slow" growth caused a number of its stockholders to complain, saying that the company was not reachingprofitability fast enough. When the Internet "bubble" burst and many e-companies began going out of business, Amazon perseveredand finally turned its first-ever profit in the fourth quarter of 2002. It totaled a meager $5 million, just 1 cent per share, onrevenues of over $1 billion, but it was extremely important symbolically for a company that kept promising profitability butwasn't delivering. It has since remained profitable and maintained revenues of over $1 billion per fiscal quarter. In January2004 Amazon posted its first full-year net profit (for calendar year 2003). Its profits were $35.3 million on revenues of $5.65billion. Much of the growth of the company was due to its international division. Recognizing the website's success in popularizing online shopping, Bezos was named Man of the Year by Time Magazine in 1999 . Amazon's bookstore quickly began expanding, branching off into retail sales of music CDs , videos and DVDs , software , consumer electronics , kitchenitems, tools, lawn and garden items, toys , apparel , sporting goods, gourmet food , jewelry , watches , health and personal-care items, beauty products , and more. InJanuary 2004, Amazon launched its Presidential Candidates feature, whereby customers could donate from $5 to $200 to thecampaigns of U.S. presidentialhopefuls . Site featuresAmazon assigns a unique identifier to all items it sells, the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). For books, the ASIN is the same as theitem's ISBN . Amazon offers access to its catalog via web services , much as Google does to its search engine . In addition, Amazon's a9.com provides search engine services directly on the Amazon.com site. "Search Inside the Book" is a feature which makes it possible for customers to search for keywords in the full text of morethan 120,000 books (or 33 million pages of text). Since October 23 , 2003 , the company has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform searches on copyrighted printed material that is not readily available elsewhere except for texts in the public domain (see list of digital library projects forexamples of these) or otherwise available in digital form. To avoid copyright violations, Amazon.com does not return thecomputer-readable text of the book but rather a picture of the page containing the found excerpt, disables printing of the pages,and puts limits on the number of pages in a book a single user can access. Patent controversiesThe company has been controversial for its use of patents as an alleged hindrance tocompetitors. The " one clickpatent " is perhaps the best-known example of this. Amazon's use of the one-click patent against competitor Barnes and Noble 's website led the Free Software Foundation to announce a boycott on Amazon in December 1999 [1] . The boycott was discontinuedin September 2002 [2] . On February 25 , 2003 , the companywas granted a patent titled "Method and system for conducting a discussion relating to an item" on Internet discussion boards . Expansion, locations, and partnershipsAmazon.com operates retail websites not only for the United States, but also in Canada , the United Kingdom , the Netherlands , Germany , Austria , France and Japan . In addition, the websites of Borders .com, Waldenbooks .com, Virginmega .com,Virginmega.co.jp, Waterstones .co.uk, CDNOW .com and HMV .com now redirect to Amazon's site for the country in question, for which these companies are paid referral fees.Typing ToysRUs .com into one's browser will similarly bring up Amazon.com's Toys& Games tab. Amazon.com also operates the retail websites of Target Corporation 's internet properties (including the online stores of Target , Marshall Field's , and Mervyn's ) and provides thetechnology behind AOL Shopping and the online NBA store. Corporate headquarters are on Beacon Hill in Seattle, Washington; the rest of the Seattle workforce operates outof the International District and Rainier Valley . There are also domestic operations in Tacoma, Washington ; Campbellsville and Lexington,Kentucky ; Grand Forks, North Dakota ; Huntington, West Virginia ; New Castle, Delaware ; Coffeyville, Kansas ; Fairfax County, Virginia ; and Fernley,Nevada . International operations are in Slough and Milton Keynes , England ; Gourock , Scotland ; Guyancourt and Orléans , France ; Munich , Regensburg and Bad Hersfeld , Germany ; and Tokyo , Sapporo , and Ichikawa , Japan . According to information in the Amazon.com discussion forums, Amazon derives about 40% of its sales from affiliates, whom theycall "associates". By the end of 2003, Amazon had signed up almost one million associates. Amazon bought the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)in April 1998 , a move that upset a number of its long-time users; the transformation ofIMDb from a public-domain, nonprofit site to a commercial venture was seen as a slap in the face to many Internet users. However,the IMDb has continued to grow and prosper. Amazon bought Alexa Internet , Accept.com , and Exchange.com in a set of deals worthapproximately $645M in June, 1999. In 2002 , Amazon became the exclusive retailer for the much-hyped Segway Human Transporter . Bezos was an early supporter of the Segway before its detailswere made public. In 2004 , Amazon launched a new search engine called a9.com . A9.com incorporates theabove-mentioned Search Inside the Book feature, allowing users to search within the text of books as well as searching for texton the Web. Trivia
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