What is Amazon

 

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon (Amazon.com) is the world's largest online retailer and a leading provider of cloud services.

 

Originally started as an online bookselling company, Amazon has morphed into an Internet commerce business largely focused on providing e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence (AI) services.

 

In keeping with the Amazon-to-buyer sales approach, the company offers a monumental assortment and inventory that allows consumers to buy almost anything, including clothing, beauty supplies, gourmet food, jewelry, books, movies, electronics, pet supplies, furniture, toys, garden supplies, and household items.

 

Headquartered in Seattle, Amazon has individual websites, software development centers, customer service centers, data centers, and distribution centers around the

History and timeline of Amazon

 world.

Amazon has come a long way since Jeff Bezos founded it in his garage in Bellevue, Washington on July 5, 1994.

 

The following is a brief history and timeline of events that developed Amazon from its humble beginnings into a multinational business empire.

The 1990s

Amazon officially launched as an online bookseller on July 16, 1995. Initially, Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra but later changed the name to Amazon. Bezos is said to have searched the dictionary for a word beginning with A for the value of alphabetical placement. He chose the name Amazon because it was exotic and different, and as a reference to his plan for the size of the company to reflect the size of the Amazon River, one of the largest rivers in the world. Since its inception, the company's motto has always been to "get to the world fast".

The 2000s

In 2005, Amazon Prime This membership-based service for Amazon customers offers free two-day shipping within the contiguous US, as well as streaming, shopping, and reading benefits. According to Amazon's website, current Amazon Prime membership rates are $14.99 per month or $139 per year.

Amazon Web Services

This complex and evolving cloud computing platform was also born in 2000. The first Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings were launched in 2006 to provide online services for websites and client-side applications. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) are the backbones of the company's growing collection of web services. In the same year, Amazon also launched a cloud computing and video-on-demand service known at the time as Inbox.

 

By changing the way people bought books, Amazon also shaped how they read them with the launch of its first Kindle e-reader in 2007. This device helps users browse, buy and read e-books, magazines, and newspapers from the Kindle Store.

From the 2010s to present

Amazon introduced its first tablet, the Kindle Fire, in 2011 and the Amazon Fire TV Stick, part of Amazon's extensive line of media streaming devices, in 2014.

 

Amazon also launched Amazon Art, an online fine art marketplace in 2013, which featured original works by famous artists such as Claude Monet and Norman Rockwell.

 

Amazon's popular home virtual assistant Alexa was introduced to consumers in 2015, followed by the Alexa-equipped Echo Dot in 2016.

 

Amazon acquired organic grocer Whole Foods in 2017 and launched Amazon Go, a chain of cashless grocery stores, in 2018.

 

The rise of home shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic has made consumers rely even more on Amazon, and this trend is likely to continue to grow.

A look at Amazon's history and the evolution of its notable products and services

Notable Amazon products and services

Amazon offers an ever-expanding portfolio of services and products. Following is a list of its noteworthy offerings.

Retail

·         Amazon Marketplace. Amazon's e-commerce platform allows third-party retailers to showcase and sell their products alongside Amazon items.

·         Amazon Fresh. Amazon's grocery pickup and delivery service are currently available in nearly two dozen U.S. cities and several international locations. Grocery orders can be placed through the Amazon Fresh website or the Amazon mobile app. Customers can either have groceries delivered or pick them up at the store.

·         Amazon vine. Launched in 2007, Amazon Vine helps manufacturers and publishers get reviews of their products so shoppers can make informed purchases.

·         Woot. Woot, acquired by Amazon in 2010, offers limited-time offers and specials that rotate daily. This store offers refurbished goods as well as new goods that are low in stock. Prime members get free shipping.

·         Zappos. Amazon bought Zappos in 2009. The online shoe and clothing retailer carries a wide variety of brands, including Nike, Sperry, Adidas, and Uggs.

·         Merch from Amazon. This on-demand t-shirt printing service allows sellers to create and upload their t-shirt designs for free and earn royalties on each sale. Amazon will do the rest – from printing the t-shirts to delivering them to customers.

·         Amazon Handmade. This platform allows artisans to sell their handmade products to customers around the world.

Consumer technology

·         Amazon Kindle. Amazon's first e-reader, Kindle, allows users to browse, buy and read e-books, magazines, and newspapers from the Kindle Store.

·         Amazon Fire tablet. Amazon's popular and high-profile Fire tablet, formerly known as the Kindle Fire, competes with Apple's iPad.

·         Amazon Fire TV. This line of Amazon digital media streaming players and devices delivers streaming video content over the Internet to a paired high-definition television.

·         Amazon Alexa. This cloud-based artificial intelligence and voice-activated personal assistant is designed to answer questions, interact with users, and perform other tasks and commands.

·         Amazon Echo. This is one of Amazon's smart home devices that comes equipped with a speaker and connects to Alexa. Amazon Echo can perform several functions, including talking about the weather, creating shopping lists, and controlling other smart products such as lights, switches, and televisions.

·         Amazon Echo Dot. A smaller, puck-shaped version of the original Amazon Echo, the Echo Dot can be placed in any room and can answer questions, play music, and read news and other stories.

·         Amazon Echo Show. As part of the Amazon Echo line of speakers, the Amazon Echo Show works similarly through Alexa, but also offers a 7-inch touch screen for playing videos and music and making video calls with other Echo users.

·         Amazon Astro. This is Amazon's first home monitoring robot that works with Alexa. It is designed to help with a variety of household tasks, such as home monitoring, caring for the elderly through alerts and notifications, and following owners from room to room to play TV shows, music, or podcasts.

Subscription services

·         Amazon Prime. This subscription service gives members access to exclusive shopping and entertainment services, discounts, and more. For example, all Amazon Prime members can enjoy free one- or two-day shipping on eligible orders.

·         Amazon Prime Video. It is a video-on-demand streaming service from Amazon that offers a selection of about 24,000 movies and more than 2,100 TV shows. This service is part of Amazon Prime membership.

·         Amazon Drive. Amazon Drive, formerly known as Amazon Cloud Drive, is a cloud storage application that offers Amazon customers 5 gigabytes (GB) of free and secure online storage for photos, videos, and files. Amazon Prime members get free, unlimited storage for full-resolution photos along with 5GB of storage for videos.

·         Twitch Prime. The monthly subscription service Twitch Prime is a subsidiary of Amazon Prime. It gives members premium access to Twitch, a video streaming platform that offers a fun and social way to watch people play games.

·         Amazon Music Prime. This is Amazon's music streaming service that is free for Prime members.

Digital content

·         Amazon Pay. Amazon Pay, an online transaction processing platform, allows Amazon account holders to use their Amazon accounts to make payments to third-party online merchants.

·         Amazon Music Unlimited. Amazon's premium music service costs $8.99 per month for Prime members and $9.99 for non-Prime members.

·         The Kindle Store. Part of Amazon's retail website, the Kindle Store is accessible from any Kindle device and purchases e-books.

·         Amazon App store for Android. The Amazon App Store for Android allows users to download games and mobile apps to supported devices.

       AWS

·         S3. This is Amazon's scalable cloud object storage. Files are referred to as objects in S3 and are stored in containers called buckets.

·         Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). SQS is a pay-per-use web service designed to provide access to a waiting message queue where messages can sit until a computer processes them.

·         Amazon EC2. This web service interface provides scalability with variable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. Users can run virtual servers or instances, commonly known as EC2 instances that can scale up or down depending on network requirements.

·         Amazon Glacier S3. Amazon S3 Glacier is a low-cost cloud storage service for data that can be associated with longer loading times. It also offers data archiving and cold data backup.

·         AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM provides secure and controlled access to resources.

·         Amazon Redshift. This cloud data warehouse enables users to query petabytes of structured and semi-structured data using standard structured query language queries. For example, to address growing transaction volume, NASDAQ moved from a legacy on-premises data center to the AWS cloud, which is powered by an Amazon Redshift cluster.

Amazon AI services

 ·         Amazon Sage Maker. Amazon Sage Maker, a fully managed cloud-based machine learning platform, enables developers and data scientists to build, train, and deploy machine learning models for predictive analytics applications.

·         Amazon Lex. This service for building conversational interfaces into any voice and text application is powered by the same technology as Alexa.

·         Amazon Polly. Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech service, uses deep learning technology to convert text to spoken audio. Contains 60 voices in 29 languages.

·         Amazon Rekognition. This facial recognition and analytics platform as a service uses a deep learning algorithm to process images and extracts information from them.

·         AWS Deep Lens. This programmable video camera allows developers to easily experiment with machine learning, AI, and the Internet of Things.

·         Alexa voice service. This programming interface provides developers with a set of C++ libraries to add Amazon Alexa speech and other features to their apps and devices.

·         Amazon Transcribe. This service quickly and accurately converts speech to text using a deep learning process called automatic speech recognition.

·         Amazon translator. Amazon Translate is a cloud-based service that can translate large amounts of text written in one language into another.

·         Alexa Skills Kit. This software development kit allows developers to create skills or conversational applications on Amazon Alexa.

Amazon privately owned brands

·         Amazon Basics. This is Amazon's private low-budget brand that mainly sells kitchen, tech, and home products.

·         Amazon Elements. This line of home products includes health and personal care items as well as nutritional supplements.

·         Mama Bear. This Amazon private label sells baby wipes, diapers for newborns up to size 6, baby food, diaper pail refills, and baby laundry detergent.

·         Fast! . The brand started as a laundry detergent in 2016, but has added household paper towels and toilet paper to its product line.

·         Amazon Essentials. Exclusive to the Prime program, this clothing line offers basic clothing for men, women, infants, and children with additional options for family, big and tall, and sports activities.

·         Happy Belly. This Amazon private label was introduced in 2016 and sells snacks. In February 2019, the brand also started offering milk delivery services.

·         Good threads. This menswear line is exclusively available to Amazon Prime members. The brand offers both casual and professional pieces and is considered to be slightly higher quality and more stylish than the Amazon Essentials brand. 

 

From online shopping to subscription services to publishing, Amazon offers products and services in a multitude of industries.

Notable Amazon subsidiaries and acquisitions

From healthcare to entertainment, Amazon has acquired multiple companies by tapping into a variety of sectors over time.

Following is a list of Amazon's notable acquisitions and subsidiary companies:

·         IMDb. The world's most popular database of movies, television, celebrities, video games, and streaming online content was acquired by Amazon in 1998.

·         Audible. Audible, a provider of book and spoken audio content, was bought by Amazon in 2008 for $300 million.

·         Zappos. Amazon acquired the online shoe and clothing retailer in 2009 in a $1.2 billion full-store deal.

·         Twitch. Twitch, a social media and video game streaming platform, was purchased by Amazon for $970 million in 2014.

·         Whole foods. Grocery, beverage, and organic grocery chain Whole Foods was bought by Amazon for $13.7 billion in 2017.

·         Ring. Amazon took ownership of the security and smart home company in 2018 for $1 billion.

·         Zoox. The autonomous vehicle, robotics, and transportation company were acquired by Amazon as a wholly-owned subsidiary in 2020 for $1.2 billion.

·         Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Amazon acquired this film and television studio for $8.5 billion in March 2022.

Amazon controversies and criticisms

Amazon has suffered a massive backlash over the years from multiple sources. The tech giant is also being held responsible for creating the Amazon effect -- the evolution and disruption of the retail market due to the company exhibiting monopolistic behaviors.

Following are a few concerns and allegations that Amazon has faced over time:

•         Monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior. Because of Amazon's size and economies of scale, it overprices local and small merchants and is accused of displacing the open market with a privately controlled market. This is leading to the slow death of the brick-and-mortar model built by companies like Sears and J.C. Penney.

•         Unfair treatment of workers. Amazon is often under scrutiny for providing unfair working conditions in its warehouses, including treating workers like robots, providing low wages, and creating unsafe working conditions.

•         Huge carbon footprint. Over the past two decades, Amazon has been accused by environmental activists of having a staggering carbon footprint. The transportation of any goods relies on oil, and because Amazon ships anything everywhere, it leaves a long-lasting carbon footprint that automatically falls on its shoulders.

•         Electronic waste. A recent investigation by the British television network ITV revealed how Amazon is contributing to the global e-waste crisis by destroying millions of unused or returned products. This also includes millions of electronics such as phones, computers, and televisions that are toxic to the soil, water, air, and wildlife.

•         Lists of counterfeit products. Amazon has been under scrutiny from brands, shoppers, and lawmakers as counterfeiters have listed and sold fake products on Amazon through its third-party marketplace. To crack down on counterfeit products on its site, Amazon destroyed 2 million counterfeit products sent to its warehouses in 2021 and blocked 10 billion fake records.

•         Tax avoidance. Amazon is fast approaching monopoly status and has been criticized for frequently avoiding paying taxes despite its huge profits. The company avoided about $5.2 billion in federal corporate taxes in 2021, according to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Amazon finances

According to a news release posted on Amazon's investor relations website, Amazon experienced a significant increase in net sales but a decrease in operating income in the first quarter of 2022.

Following are some notable statistics from the release:

 

·         Net sales increased 7% to $116.4 billion in the first quarter, compared to $108.5 billion in the first quarter of 2021. Excluding the $1.8 billion adverse impact of year-over-year currency changes during the quarter, net sales increased by 9 % compared to the first quarter of 2021.

·         Operating income decreased to $3.7 billion in the first quarter, compared to $8.9 billion in the first quarter of 2021.

·         The net loss was $3.8 billion in the first quarter, compared to a net profit of $8.1 billion in the first quarter of 2021.