What is Amazon? Amazon Reviews

Company Development

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 16, 1995. It was originally called Cadabra. Its nature was basically an online bookstore. However, the visionary Bezos saw the potential and characteristics of the Internet. When a large physical bookstore offers 200,000 books, an online bookstore can provide readers with more choices than 200,000 books.

Bezos renamed Cadabra after the Amazon River, which is home to the most species of life on Earth, and reopened it in July 1995. The company was originally registered in Washington State in 1994, and changed its registration to Delaware in 1996. Its stock was listed on May 15, 1997. The code is AMZN, and the price of one share is $18 (as of the close of October 12, 2012, the stock price was $242.36).

status quo

Software, appliances, kitchen items, tools, lawn and garden items, toys, clothing, sporting goods, gourmet foods, jewelry, watches, health and personal care items, beauty products, musical instruments and more.

In January 2004, Amazon launched a special campaign for presidential candidates, encouraging customers to donate between $5 and $200 to their favorite presidential candidates as campaign funds. In 1999, Bezos became Time magazine's Person of the Year for his successful business strategy.

develop

In 2003, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services, which had begun several years earlier as Merchant.com, a company that helped other retailers build their own online shopping sites using Amazon's e-commerce tools.

In 2004, Amazon opened Lab 126, a computer hardware research and development department. This laboratory in Sunnyvale created: Kindle, Kindle Fire Tablet, Amazon Fire TV.

In 2006, the company launched Amazon S3, which marked the beginning of global cloud computing.

In 2006, Amazon Video was launched for purchasing and downloading videos.

In 2007, Amazon launched an online music service: Amazon Music.

In 2007, Amazon Pay was launched for online payments.

In 2011, Amazon Lending was launched, mainly to provide credit services to businesses that otherwise have difficulty obtaining credit. It has currently issued billions of dollars in loans.

In 2014, Amazon launched a new product, the smart speaker Echo. In essence, Echo is a speaker with built-in smart home connection standards and an AI-based voice assistant Alexa. It can listen to songs, implement voice commands, including shopping, smart home control, and more.

In 2006, Amazon launched a milestone business for third-party sellers - FBA.

In 2014, Amazon launched a photo storage service called Amazon Photos, which allows users to access Amazon Drive, a cloud-based file storage service.

In 2014, Amazon established Lab126, a computer hardware research and development division. The Sunnyvale, California-based lab subsequently developed some of Amazon's most successful products, including the Kindle e-book reader launched in 2007 and its subsequent updates, the Kindle Fire tablet released in 2011, the Fire TV set-top box and Fire TV stick launched in 2014, the smart speaker Echo launched in 2015, and the smaller version Echo Dot launched in 2016.

In 2015, Amazon launched Amazon Tickets to sell tickets for concerts and other live events.

In 2015, Amazon Echo smart speaker was launched.

In 2017, Amazon launched the Amazon Key secure delivery service, which allows Amazon employees to deliver packages to users' homes using a Cloud Cam surveillance camera, a compatible smart lock, and the Amazon Key app.

Acquisitions

In April 1998, Amazon acquired IMDb (Internet Movie Database).

In August 1998, Amazon acquired Junglee (a data mining company) for $186 million.

In August 1998, Amazon acquired Planetall (a social networking company) for $93 million.

In June 1999, Amazon acquired Alexa for $250 million;

In April 2003, Amazon acquired its online music store competitor en: CD Now;

In August 2004, Amazon acquired China's Joyo.com (which was then an online bookstore) for $75 million.

In 2005, Amazon acquired Amazon Mechanical Turk, a website where organizations can hire individuals to complete odd tasks, such as labeling data for machine learning algorithms. Mechanical Turk is popular among academic researchers for collecting survey and experimental data.

In July 2005, Amazon acquired CustomFlix (DVD producer);

In February 2006, Amazon acquired Shopbop (a women's fashion shopping website);

In May 2007, Amazon acquired Dpreview (a digital camera review website);

In March 2008, Amazon acquired Audible (an audiobook website) for $300 million.

In July 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos (online shoe store) for $1.2 billion;

In June 2010, Amazon acquired Woot (a group buying website) for $110 million.

In 2012, Amazon acquired the robotics company Kiva Systems for $775 million, which was later renamed Amazon Robotics and used for automated and intelligent operations in Amazon's unmanned warehouses.

In early 2014, Amazon acquired American video game developer Double Helix Games and renamed it Amazon Game Studios;

In 2014, Amazon acquired the popular live streaming platform Twitch for $970 million;

In 2014, Amazon also acquired Curse, a gaming community with a large user base;

In 2015, Amazon acquired the startup Shoefitr, which uses 3D technology to help customers determine shoe size when shopping online.

In 2017, Amazon acquired 3D body scanning and modeling company Body Labs and game development platform GameSparks. Both companies were used to flesh out Amazon's expansion into augmented and virtual reality.

In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods, a high-end grocery store chain with hundreds of locations.

India Station

Amazon India was launched in June 2013. It took Amazon 37 months (until July 2016) to achieve its first milestone of 100,000 sellers.

By June 2017, the second milestone was achieved – the number of sellers exceeded 200,000.

In February 2018, the number of sellers on Amazon India reached 300,000.

In September 2018, just seven months later, the number of sellers on Amazon India exceeded 400,000.

Chinese Sellers

quantity

In 2013, the number of Chinese sellers on Amazon's "Global Store" increased by 196%, to approximately 2 million third-party sellers worldwide, while sales in the UK market increased by more than 560%.

In 2015, the number of customers increased 13 times compared to 2012 when Amazon officially started to recruit investors in mainland China.

In 2017, Amazon added 1 million new sellers, more than one-third of which were contributed by Chinese sellers. Among the total number of sellers on the platform, the number of Chinese sellers accounts for more than one-third.

Since 2018, more than 1.2 million new sellers have joined Amazon, with an average of 3,459 new sellers joining every day, 144 new sellers joining every hour, and more than 2 new sellers joining every minute.

Sales

2015 – 70,000 third-party sellers had annual sales of more than $100,000.

2016 – 100,000 third-party sellers had annual sales of more than $100,000, a year-over-year increase of 42%.

2017 - 140,000 third-party sellers had annual sales of more than $100,000, a year-on-year increase of 40%.

In 2018, 200,000 third-party sellers had annual sales of more than $100,000, a year-on-year increase of 40% (an increase of nearly 60,000 from 2017), and more than 50,000 had annual sales of more than $500,000; the number of small and medium-sized enterprises with annual sales of more than $1 million increased by 20% in 2018.

References

• 1. How shocking is the number of Amazon sellers with sales exceeding $1 million in 2018? : NetEase [cited on 2019-01-29]
• 2. Amazon Global Selling: Cross-border Knowledge [cited on 2019-04-18]