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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.[16] In 2016, Dutch and Polish language versions of the German Amazon website were launched.[17][18]

In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization,[19] and is, as of 2016 Q3, the fourth most valuable public company.[20] 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.[21] 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

Jeff Bezos incorporated the company as "Cadabra" on July 5, 1994.[12] Bezos changed the name to Amazon a year later after a lawyer misheard its original name as "cadaver".[22] In September 1994, Bezos purchased the URL 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.[23][24] The company went online as in 1995.[25]




The company began as an online bookstore, an idea spurred off with discussion with John Ingram of Ingram Book (now called Ingram Content Group), along with Keyur Patel who still holds a stake in Amazon.[31] Amazon was able to access books at wholesale from Ingram. In the first two months of business, Amazon sold to all 50 states and over 45 countries. Within two months, Amazon's sales were up to $20,000/week.[32] While the largest brick and mortar bookstores and mail order catalogs might offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could "carry" several times more, since it would have a practically unlimited virtual (not actual) warehouse: those of the actual product makers/suppliers.


Amazon's initial business plan was unusual; it did not expect to make a profit for four to five years. This "slow" growth caused stockholders to complain about the company not reaching profitability fast enough to justify investing in, or to even survive in the long-term. When the dot-com bubble burst at the start of the 21st century, destroying many e-companies in the process, Amazon survived and grew on past the bubble burst to become a huge player in online sales. It finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million (i.e., 1¢ per share), on revenues of more than $1 billion. This profit margin, though extremely modest, proved to skeptics that Bezos' unconventional business model could succeed.[35] In 1999, Time magazine named Bezos the Person of the Year, recognizing the company's success in popularizing online shopping.


Amazon announced on October 11, 2016, plans to build convenience stores and develop curbside pickup locations for food.[37] In December 2016, the Amazon Go store was opened to Amazon employees in Seattle.[38] The store uses a variety of sensors and automatically charges a shopper's Amazon account as they walk out of the store, therefore there are no checkout lines.[39][40] The store is planned to open for the general public in early 2017.[41][42]

In 2011, Amazon had 30,000 full-time employees in the USA and by the end of 2016, it had 180,000 employees . It employed 306,800 people in full- and part-time jobs worldwide.[43]

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