The Amazon retailer officially launched in 1995 and has been on a real upward trajectory to this day. In this article, we’ve put together five things you may not have known about the world’s largest virtual marketplace.
- It all started with book sales
When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon on the 5 of July 1994 and launched Amazon.com in the summer of the following year, it was a much smaller site. At the time, Amazon offered consumers a global bookshop, which Bezos managed from his garage. Since then, Amazon has expanded as a Western marketplace that has expanded to sell almost any kind of product. It is a testament to the company’s success that Bezos, 58, is himself listed as the world’s second richest person, just behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
- The original name referred to magic
Bezos first named the store he was building with another name, Cadabra, which was taken from the magical expression abracadabra. However, Bezos’ lawyer thought the magical name was too confusing and feared that it would be confused with the word cadaver, which means corpse in English.
Eventually, the two came up with a new name, Amazon, known as the largest river in South America. The grandiose name was a metaphorical way of conveying the scale of the bookstore Bezos had set up.
- You still can’t buy everything on Amazon
Amazon is known as the world’s largest marketplace, where you can buy almost anything. So it’s easier to list the things you can’t buy there. These include full-size apartments, cars, cigarettes, scars and lottery tickets, firearms, contact lenses, wine, petrol, fireworks and live animals.
- A more pet-friendly business can be found
If bringing dogs into the workplace is important to an employee, you can look no further than Amazon for a better choice of employer. After all, people’s best friends are warmly welcomed at Amazon’s Seattle campus, where around 6,000 dogs visit every day. One of the campus buildings even has a fire hydrant, not a real one of course, to make the furry friends feel as at home as possible.
- Amazon has repeated Apple’s spectacular success
One of Amazon’s wildest achievements in 2018 was becoming only the second American company in history to reach a market capitalisation of $1 trillion or $1,000 billion. Previously, only tech giant Apple had achieved the same. Amazon’s success is no surprise, as on average every dollar spent online in the US brings in as much as 49 cents.
