Amazon, a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, Washington, is the global leader in e-commerce. Since Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1995, Amazon has significantly expanded its product offerings, international sites, and worldwide network of fulfillment and customer service centers. Today, Amazon offers everything from books and electronics to tennis rackets and diamond jewelry. Amazon operates sites in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Italy, and China (Joyo.com) and maintains dozens of fulfillment centers around the world which encompass more than 17.5 million square feet.
Amazon hires the world’s brightest minds, offering them an environment in which they can relentlessly improve the experience for customers. Amazon does this every day by solving complex technical and business problems with ingenuity and simplicity. Amazon’s making history and the good news is that we’ve only just begun.
Technological innovation drives the growth of Amazon, offering our customers more types of products, more conveniently, and at even lower prices. We offer a personalized shopping experience for each customer, book discovery through "Search Inside The Book", convenient checkout using "1-Click© Shopping", and several community features like Listmania and Wish Lists that help our customers to discover new products and make informed buying decisions.
In 2000, Amazon began to offer its best-of-breed e-commerce platform to other retailers and to individual sellers. Now, big-name retailers work with Amazon Services to power their e-commerce offerings from end-to-end, including technology services, merchandising, customer service, and order fulfillment. Other branded merchants also leverage Amazon as an incremental sales channel for their new merchandise; you can find products from top retailers across Amazon’s retail sites. Finally, independent software developers also derive value from the platform--through Amazon Web Services--by building profitable applications and services that cater to Amazon customers and sellers.
This evolution of Amazon from Web site to e-commerce partner to development platform is driven by the spirit of innovation that is part of the company's DNA. E-commerce is still in its infancy. In the years to come, you'll see Amazon create new technologies, expand into more geographies and continue to improve the lives of shoppers and sellers around the world.
To learn more about Amazon today, explore the website links below. You can also visit our investor relations and PR sites to review our last annual report and read recent announcements about partnerships and product launches.