Introducing Amazon – The Ecommerce Giant
What started as a virtual bookstore in July 1995 founded by Jeff Bezos has now grown into one of the internet and even the world’s biggest success stories. When we look back on history and the internet, Amazon will surely have its name in the books.
It is now the world’s largest retailer – not just online, but the largest one in the world – and hosts a number of prominent services such as its cloud services, Amazon Prime, Amazon Key and Amazon Alexa.
Like many other internet oriented technology and ecommerce companies, Amazon has a large history in taking over other companies through acquisitions and this is partly what has made it so successful.
The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, settled on ‘Amazon’ as the name for his new book company when he looked through the English dictionary in the ‘A’ section. Back when Bezos registered Amazon’s domain, websites beginning with ‘A’ would appear first in search engines.
Other names Bezos considered were ‘Awake’, ‘Browse’, ‘Aard’, ‘Bookmall’ and even ‘Make It So’… for some reason.
It is amazing to see how far Amazon has come over the years, especially when you look at how it operated in the very beginning. At the start, Amazon had no inventory so when a customer ordered a book, Amazon employees had to go out and purchase it before sending it off to customers.
It took about a week to deliver most books and this could turn into several weeks if a book was particularly hard to find. After five years of operation, Amazon’s profits in 2002 were just a measly $5 million – tiny compared to its profits now – and this is possibly due to the inefficient book selling operation it ran.
Innovation is the key to Amazon’s success
Although Amazon’s profits early on were underwhelming, all that started to change when Amazon entered the ecommerce market as a retailer and began to innovate. Also contributory to Amazon’s success is the large range of Amazon deals which are always available.
The company is big on robotics and artificial intelligence. In fact, Amazon is increasingly incorporating these into its daily operations.
Now, over 45,000 robots are used by Amazon across all of its warehouses. Its warehouses are big too. Texas is home to Amazon’s largest fulfillment center which covers a gigantic 1,264,200 feet and can ship over 1,000,000 items during the holiday season.
Amazon has also created and began trailing a drone which they intend to introduce over the next few years. It is estimated that there will be one Amazon drone for every 1,000 people in the US as early as next year!
By 2020, Amazon expects to have over 450,000 drones in its fleet which can fly for a range of 15 miles and deliver a package in under 30 minutes.
These are just a handful of Amazon’s latest innovations. These are indicative of the lengths Bezos is willing to go to in making Amazon stand out and find success.
If you want to learn more about Amazon, why not check out our info-graphic? It is full of interesting facts, figures and information.
