Amazon (company)

Amazon.com, Inc., is an American multinational technology company based in Seattle, Washington, that focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies along with Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.

Amazon is known for its disruption of well-established industries through technological innovation and mass scale. It is the world's largest e-commerce marketplace, AI assistant provider, and cloud computing platform as measured by revenue and market capitalization. Amazon is the largest Internet company by revenue in the world. It is the second largest private employer in the United States and one of the world's most valuable companies. Amazon is the second largest technology company by revenue.

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994, in Bellevue, Washington. The company initially started as an online marketplace for books but later expanded to sell electronics, software, video games, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization. In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $13.4 billion, which vastly increased Amazon's presence as a brick-and-mortar retailer. In 2018, Bezos announced that its two-day delivery service, Amazon Prime, had surpassed 100 million subscribers worldwide.

Amazon distributes downloads and streaming of video, music, audiobook through its Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music, and Audible subsidiaries. Amazon also has a publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, a film and television studio, Amazon Studios, and a cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services. It produces consumer electronics including Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Echo devices. In addition, Amazon subsidiaries also include Ring, Twitch.tv, Whole Foods Market, and IMDb. Among various controversies, the company has been criticized for technological surveillance overreach, a hyper-competitive and demanding work culture, tax avoidance, and anti-competitive practices.

History
In 1994, Bezos incorporated Amazon. In May 1997, the organization went public. The company began selling music and videos in 1998, at which time it began operations internationally by acquiring online sellers of books in United Kingdom and Germany. The following year, the organization also sold video games, consumer electronics, home-improvement items, software, games and toys in addition to other items.

In 2002, the corporation started Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provided data on Web site popularity, Internet traffic patterns and other statistics for marketers and developers. In 2006, the organization grew its AWS portfolio with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which rents computer processing power as well as Simple Storage Service (S3), that rents data storage via the Internet, was made available. That same year, the company started Fulfillment by Amazon which managed the inventory of individuals and small companies selling their belongings through the company internet site. In 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems to automate its inventory-management business, purchasing Whole Foods Market supermarket chain five years later in 2017.

Board of directors
As of May 2018, the board of directors is:
 * Jeff Bezos, President, CEO, and Chairman
 * Tom Alberg, Managing partner, Madrona Venture Group
 * John Seely Brown, Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at University of Southern California
 * Jamie Gorelick, partner, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale, and Dorr
 * Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Dean and Vice Provost, Cornell University
 * Judy McGrath, former CEO, MTV Networks
 * Jon Rubinstein, former Chairman, and CEO, Palm, Inc.
 * Thomas O. Ryder, former Chairman, and CEO, Reader's Digest Association
 * Patty Stonesifer, President, and CEO, Martha's Table
 * Wendell P. Weeks, Chairman, President, and CEO, Corning Inc.

Products and services
Amazon.com's product lines available at its website include several media (books, DVDs, music CDs, videotapes and software), apparel, baby products, consumer electronics, beauty products, gourmet food, groceries, health and personal-care items, industrial & scientific supplies, kitchen items, jewelry, watches, lawn and garden items, musical instruments, sporting goods, tools, automotive items and toys & games. In August 2019, Amazon applied to have a liquor store in San Francisco, CA as a means to ship beer and alcohol within the city. Amazon has separate retail websites for some countries and also offers international shipping of some of its products to certain other countries.

Amazon.com has a number of products and services available, including:


 * AmazonFresh
 * Amazon Prime
 * Amazon Web Services
 * Alexa
 * Appstore
 * Amazon Drive
 * Echo
 * Kindle
 * Fire tablets
 * Fire TV
 * Video
 * Kindle Store
 * Music
 * Music Unlimited
 * Amazon Digital Game Store
 * Amazon Studios
 * AmazonWireless

Website
The domain amazon.com attracted at least 615 million visitors annually by 2008. Amazon attracts over 130 million customers to its US website per month by the start of 2016. The company has also invested heavily on a massive amount of server capacity for its website, especially to handle the excessive traffic during the December Christmas holiday season.

Results generated by Amazon's search engine are partly determined by promotional fees.

Amazon's localized storefronts, which differ in selection and prices, are differentiated by top-level domain and country code: