Amazon

On July 5, 1994, Amazon was founded as "Cadabra" by Jeff Bezos, after he relocated from New York City to Bellevue, Washington, to operate an online bookstore. Bezos chose Seattle for its abundance of technical talent from Microsoft and the University of Washington, as well as its smaller population and the proximity to a major book distribution warehouse in Roseburg, Oregon. Seattle beat out Portland, Oregon and Boulder, Colorado.

In November 1994, Bezos renamed the company Amazon to reflect his ambitions for his company. (Amazon is the world's largest river.)

On July 16, 1995, the Amazon website launched, initially sourcing its books directly from wholesalers and publishers.

In 1998, Amazon began selling music and videos. It began international operations by acquiring online booksellers in the UK and Germany. In 1999, it expanded to sell more products, including music, video games, consumer electronics, home improvement items, software, games, and toys.

In 2000, US toy retailer Toys "R" Us entered into a 10-year agreement with Amazon, valued at $50 million per year plus a cut of sales, under which Toys "R" Us would be the exclusive supplier of toys and baby products on the service, and the chain's website would redirect to Amazon's Toys & Games category. In 2004, Toys "R" Us sued Amazon, claiming that because of a perceived lack of variety in Toys "R" Us stock, Amazon had knowingly allowed third-party sellers to offer items on the service in categories that Toys "R" Us had been granted exclusivity. In 2006, a court ruled in favor of Toys "R" Us, giving it the right to unwind its agreement with Amazon and establish its independent e-commerce website. The company was later awarded $51 million in damages.

In 2001, Amazon entered into a similar agreement with Borders, under which Amazon would comanage Borders.com as a co-branded service. Borders pulled out of the arrangement in 2007.

In 2002, the company launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), which initially focused on providing APIs for web developers to build web applications on top of Amazon's e-commerce platform. In 2004, AWS expanded to provide website popularity statistics and web crawler data from its Alexa Web Information Service. …

Amazon.com sells products in many categories, including media (books, movies, music, and software), apparel, baby products, consumer electronics, beauty products, gourmet food, groceries, health and personal care products, industrial and scientific supplies, kitchen items, jewelry, watches, lawn and garden items, musical instruments, sporting goods, tools, automotive items, toys and games, and farm supplies and consulting services. Amazon websites are country-specific (for example, amazon.com for the US and amazon.co.uk for UK) though some offer international shipping.

Visits to amazon.com grew from 615 million annual visitors in 2008, to more than 2 billion per month in 2022. The e-commerce platform is the world's 12th most visited.

Results generated by Amazon's search engine are partly determined by promotional fees. The company's localized storefronts, which differ in selection and prices, are differentiated by top-level domain and country code:

Amazon sells many products under its own brand names, including phone chargers, batteries, and diaper wipes. and features hundreds of product lines. Amazon owned 34 private-label brands as of 2019. These brands account for 0.15% of Amazon's global sales, whereas the average for other large retailers is 18%. Other Amazon retail brands include AmazonBasics, Presto!, Mama Bear, and Amazon Essentials.

Amazon derives many of its sales (around 40% in 2008) from third-party sellers who sell products on Amazon. Some other large e-commerce sellers use Amazon to sell their products in addition to selling direct. Orders are processed through Amazon.com and end up at individual sellers for processing and order. Some sellers lease space from Amazon. Small sellers of used and new goods go to Amazon Marketplace to offer goods.

Publishers can sign up as affiliates and receive a commission for referring customers to Amazon by placing links to Amazon on their websites should the referral result in a sale. Worldwide, Amazon had over 900,000 affiliates (2010). As of mid-2014, the Amazon Affiliate Program was used by 1.2% of all websites and was the second most popular advertising network after Google Ads. …

Amazon's global headquarters occupy more than 40 buildings spread across Seattle's adjacent South Lake Union, Denny Triangle, and Downtown neighborhoods. The first 14 buildings Amazon occupied in South Lake Union were purchased for $1.16 billion in 2016. The company was previously headquartered in rented space within the Pacific Medical Center, from 1998 to 2011.

Amazon built a four tower, four low-rise, complex in Seattle's Denny Triangle neighborhood to serve as primary headquarters, though it retained many other buildings to house its more than 45,000 corporate employees. The new campus was designed by NBBJ and named "Rufus 2.0" after a dog, once a fixture of the company. Construction began in 2013. The first tower, nicknamed Doppler, opened on December 14, 2015.

Amazon's European headquarters are in Luxembourg's capital, Luxembourg. Its UK headquarters are at Principal Place, Shoreditch, London.

Amazon is also in the process of building a retail hub of operations center in Nashville, Tennessee.

On August 21, 2019, Amazon opened its largest campus in the world at Nanakramguda in Hyderabad, India. It is the first Amazon-owned campus located outside the US and features the single largest Amazon-owned building in the world. The 9.5-acre campus houses over 15,000 employees.

In December 2023 Amazon opened its 14-acre Amazon Africa headquarters. in Riverlands in Cape Town, South Africa.

Amazon built a major campus in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, to host 15,000 employees. The company opened its first Bellevue office in 2017. Amazon's largest building in the city is Sonic, a 42-story building, with 1 million square feet (93,000 m) of office space. It opened in 2024. The Bellevue campus included the 43-story Bellevue 600 tower, the tallest building in the city and the tallest developed by Amazon.

While much of Amazon's software development occurs in Seattle, the company employs software developers in centers across the globe. Some of these sites are run by subsidiary A2Z Development.

Amazon once operated various retail store brands, but later closed all save for Whole Foods. Most of the stores are located inside of the US, but Whole Foods also operates stores in Canada and the UK, while Amazon Go has six locations in London under the Amazon Fresh name.

Amazon uses many transportation services to move packages. …

As of August 2025, Amazon's board of directors were:

The 10 largest shareholders of Amazon at the end of October 2025:

Amazon.com started as a retail site. Amazon takes a percentage of the price of each item that it sells. It also allows companies to advertise their products by paying to be listed as featured products. In Forbes Global 2000 Amazon ranked 36th (2023).

For fiscal year 2021, Amazon reported earnings of $33.36 billion, with revenue of US$469.82 billion, a YOY increase of 21.7%.

Jeff Bezos became renowned for his annual shareholder letters. These letters expressed Bezos's perspectives and strategic focus. A common theme was his desire to instill customer-centricity (in his words, "customer obsession") at all levels of Amazon, notably by making all senior executives field customer support queries for a time at Amazon call centers. He read many emails addressed by customers to his public email address. One of Bezos's most well-known internal memos was his mandate for all teams to "expose their data and functionality" through service interfaces "designed from the ground up to be externalizable". This process, commonly known as a service-oriented architecture (SOA), resulted in mandatory dogfooding of services that later became commercialized via AWS.

Amazon used internal recognition programs such as the Just Do It Award to encourage employee initiative.

Amazon's meeting culture is document-driven. It is designed to encourage deep thinking, shared context, and efficient decision-making, avoiding polished presentations and large gatherings. Practices:

Amazon lobbies governments on issues such as the enforcement of sales taxes on online sales, transportation safety, privacy and data protection, and intellectual property. According to regulatory filings, Amazon.com focuses its US lobbying on the US Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Reserve. In 2019, it spent $16.8 million and had a team of 104 lobbyists.

Amazon.com was a corporate member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) until it dropped membership following protests at its shareholders' meeting on May 24, 2012.

In 2014, Amazon expanded its lobbying practices as it prepared to lobby the Federal Aviation Administration to approve its drone delivery program, hiring the Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld lobbying firm in June. …

Amazon has been criticized on many issues, including anti-competitive business practices, its treatment of workers, offering counterfeit or plagiarized products, objectionable content of its books, tax and subsidy deals with governments supplying law enforcement with facial recognition surveillance tools; forming cloud computing partnerships with the CIA; leading customers away from bookshops; adversely impacting the environment; placing a low priority on warehouse conditions for workers; actively opposing unionization efforts; remotely deleting content purchased by Amazon Kindle users; taking public subsidies; seeking to patent its 1-Click technology; engaging in anti-competitive actions and price discrimination; and reclassifying LGBTQ books as adult content. Criticism has also concerned various decisions over whether to censor or publish content such as the WikiLeaks website, works containing libel, anti-LGBT merchandise, and material facilitating dog fighting, cockfighting, or pedophile activities.

An article published by Time in the wake of social media website Parler's termination of service by Amazon Web Service highlights the power companies like Amazon now have over the internet. In December 2011, Amazon faced a backlash from small businesses for running a one-day deal to promote its new Price Check app. Shoppers who used the app to check prices in a brick-and-mortar store were offered a 5% discount to purchase the same item from Amazon. Companies like Groupon, eBay and Taap have countered Amazon's promotion by offering $10 off from its products.

The company has also faced accusations of putting undue pressure on suppliers to maintain and extend its profitability. One effort to squeeze the most vulnerable book publishers was known within the company as the Gazelle Project, after Bezos suggested, according to Brad Stone, "that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle." In July 2014, the Federal Trade Commission launched a lawsuit against the company alleging it was promoting in-app purchases to children, which were being transacted without parental consent. In 2019, Amazon banned selling skin-lightening products after pushback from Minnesota health and environmental activists. In 2022, a lawsuit filed by state attorney-general Letitia James was dismissed by the New York state court of appeals. …