Katana VentraIP

Amazon was founded on July 5, 1994, by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington.[6] The company originally started as an online marketplace for books but gradually expanded its offerings to include a wide range of product categories. This diversification led to it being referred to as "The Everything Store".[7]


The company has multiple subsidiaries, including Amazon Web Services, providing cloud computing, Zoox, a self-driving car division, Kuiper Systems, a satellite Internet provider, and Amazon Lab126, a computer hardware R&D provider. Other subsidiaries include Ring, Twitch, IMDb, and Whole Foods Market. Its acquisition of Whole Foods in August 2017 for US$13.4 billion substantially increased its market share and presence as a physical retailer.[8]


Amazon has a reputation as a disruptor of industries through technological innovation and aggressive reinvestment of profits into capital expenditures.[9][10][11][12] As of 2023, it is the world's largest online retailer and marketplace, smart speaker provider, cloud computing service through AWS,[13] live-streaming service through Twitch, and Internet company as measured by revenue and market share.[14] In 2021, it surpassed Walmart as the world's largest retailer outside of China, driven in large part by its paid subscription plan, Amazon Prime, which has close to 200 million subscribers worldwide.[15][16] It is the second-largest private employer in the United States.[17]


As of October 2023, Amazon is the 12th-most visited website in the world and 82% of its traffic comes from the United States.[18][19]


Amazon also distributes a variety of downloadable and streaming content through its Amazon Prime Video, MGM+, Amazon Music, Twitch, Audible and Wondery[20] units. It publishes books through its publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, film and television content through Amazon MGM Studios, including the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio which acquired in March 2022. It also produces consumer electronics—most notably, Kindle e-readers, Echo devices, Fire tablets, and Fire TVs.


Amazon has been criticized for customer data collection practices,[21] a toxic work culture,[22] censorship,[23][24][25][26][27] tax avoidance,[28][29] and anti-competitive behavior.[30][31]

Type of site

  • Arabic
  • Chinese
  • Dutch
  • English
  • French
  • German
  • Hindi
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Turkish

Amazon

amazon.com (original US site)

Yes

Optional

1995 (1995)

Active

C++ and Java

, a company focused on researching and building innovative technology; it has been a subsidiary since 2003.[121]

A9.com

formerly JEE Ready, is an online learning platform for engineering students to prepare for competitive exams like the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), launched by Amazon India on 13 January 2021

Amazon Academy

Amazon Maritime, Inc. holds a license to operate as a non-vessel-owning common carrier (NVOCC), which enables the company to manage its shipments from China into the United States.[122]

Federal Maritime Commission

is an online delivery service dedicated to prescription drugs, launched in November 2020. The service provides discounts up to 80% for generic drugs and up to 40% for branded drugs for Prime subscribe users. The products can be purchased on the company's website or at over 50,000 bricks-and-mortar pharmacies in the United States.[123]

Amazon Pharmacy

, an Israel-based microelectronics company reputedly for US$350–370M acquired by Amazon Web Services in January 2015 .[124][125][126]

Annapurna Labs

Beijing Century Joyo Courier Services, which applied for a license with the US Maritime Commission. Amazon is also building out its logistics in trucking and air freight to potentially compete with UPS and FedEx.[127][128]

freight forwarding

Brilliance Audio, an audiobook publisher founded in 1984 by Michael Snodgrass in , Michigan.[129] The company produced its first eight audio titles in 1985.[129] The company was purchased by Amazon in 2007 for an undisclosed amount.[130][131] At the time of the acquisition, Brilliance was producing 12–15 new titles a month.[131] It operates as an independent company within Amazon. In 1984, Brilliance Audio invented a technique for recording twice as much on the same cassette.[132] The technique involved recording on each of the two channels of each stereo track.[132] It has been credited with revolutionizing the burgeoning audiobook market in the mid-1980s since it made unabridged books affordable.[132]

Grand Haven

, a cloud-based digital comics platform with over 200 million comic downloads as of September 2013. It offers a selection of more than 40,000 comic books and graphic novels across Android, iOS, Fire OS and Windows 8 devices and over a web browser. Amazon bought the company in April 2014.[133]

ComiXology

, which offers self-publishing services for independent content creators, publishers, film studios, and music labels, became a subsidiary in 2009.[134][135]

CreateSpace

Eero, an electronics company specializing in mesh-networking Wifi devices founded as a startup in 2014 by Nick Weaver, Amos Schallich, and Nate Hardison to simplify and innovate the smart home. Eero was acquired by Amazon in 2019 for US$97 million.[137] Eero has continued to operate under its banner and advertises its commitment to privacy despite early concerns from the company's acquisition.[138]

[136]

Health Navigator is a startup developing for online health services acquired in October 2019. The startup will form part of Amazon Care, which is the company's employee healthcare service. This follows the 2018 purchase of PillPack for under $1 billion, which has also been included into Amazon Care.[139]

APIs

Junglee, a former online shopping service provided by Amazon that enabled customers to search for products from online and offline retailers in India. Junglee started as a virtual database that was used to extract information from the Internet and deliver it to enterprise applications. As it progressed, Junglee started to use its database technology to create a single window marketplace on the Internet by making every item from every supplier available for purchase. Web shoppers could locate, compare and transact millions of products from across the Internet shopping mall through one window. Amazon acquired Junglee in 1998, and the website Junglee.com was launched in India in February 2012[141] as a comparison-shopping website. It curated and enabled searching for a diverse variety of products such as clothing, electronics, toys, jewelry, and video games, among others, across thousands of online and offline sellers. Millions of products are browsable, the client selects a price, and then they are directed to a seller. In November 2017, Amazon closed down Junglee.com and the former domain currently redirects to Amazon India.[142]

[140]

, a subsidiary of Amazon, set up to deploy a broadband satellite internet constellation with an announced 3,236 Low Earth orbit satellites to provide satellite based Internet connectivity.[143][144][145]

Kuiper Systems

, developers of integrated consumer electronics such as the Kindle, became a subsidiary in 2004.[146]

Lab126

Shelfari, a former website for books. Shelfari users built virtual bookshelves of the titles which they owned or had read and they could rate, review, tag and discuss their books. Users could also create groups that other members could join, create discussions and talk about books, or other topics. Recommendations could be sent to friends on the site for what books to read. Amazon bought the company in August 2008.[113] Shelfari continued to function as an independent book social network within the Amazon until January 2016, when Amazon announced that it would be merging Shelfari with Goodreads and closing down Shelfari.[147][148]

social cataloging

, the former largest e-commerce platform in the Arab world. The company launched in 2005 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and served multiple areas across the Middle East.[149] On March 28, 2017, Amazon acquired Souq.com for $580 million.[150] The company was re-branded as Amazon and its infrastructure was used to expand Amazon's online platform in the Middle East.[151]

Souq

a cargo airline for bulk transport, with last-mile delivery handled either by Amazon Flex, Amazon Logistics, or the US Postal Service.

Amazon Air

executive chairman, Amazon.com, Inc.

Jeff Bezos

president and CEO, Amazon.com, Inc.

Andy Jassy

CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, former NSA director

Keith B. Alexander

Edith W. Cooper, co-founder of Medley and former EVP of

Goldman Sachs

partner, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr

Jamie Gorelick

dean of the Schwarzman College of Computing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Daniel P. Huttenlocher

former CEO, MTV Networks

Judy McGrath

former CEO, PepsiCo

Indra Nooyi

former chairman and CEO, Palm, Inc.

Jon Rubinstein

president and CEO, Martha's Table

Patty Stonesifer

chairman, president and CEO, Corning Inc.

Wendell P. Weeks

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

Amazon Pay

(ASIN)

Amazon Standard Identification Number

– a website that tracks the prices of products sold on Amazon.com

Camelcamelcamel

History of Amazon

Internal carbon pricing

List of book distributors

– Amazon.com's phrase extraction technique for indexing books

Statistically improbable phrases

Edit this at Wikidata

Official website

grouped at OpenCorporates

Amazon (company) companies

Bloomberg