When anyone talks about electronic commerce, that is, the sale of goods over the Internet, invariably one company is singled out as being the envied success story.
Taking its name from the Amazon river which is the world's second longest, Amazon-dot-com has now become the world's biggest bookstore with 2.5 million titles and 1 million customers in 160 countries.
Amazon.com's founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos (33), has always been interested in anything that can be revolutionised by computers. Intrigued by the amazing growth in the use of the Internet, Mr Bezos created a business model which utilised the Internet's unique ability to deliver huge amounts of information rapidly and efficiently.
In 1994, he founded Amazon.com, an Internet retailer of books and other information-based products which offers many services that traditional retailers cannot. One of these is lower prices.
Before heading west to Seattle in Washington state, Mr Bezos used his computer skills in the world of finance, leading the development of computer systems that helped manage more than $250 billion (£183 billion) of assets for Bankers Trust.
He also helped to build one of the most technically sophisticated quantitative hedge funds on Wall Street for D.E. Shaw & Co. He graduated with honours in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University in 1986.
He and his wife, MacKenzie, funded Amazon.com and in July 1995, it opened its retail doors on the Internet. "We are changing the way people buy books," said Mr Bezos.
The company is now the leading online retailer of books and the main bookseller on five of the top six sites on the World Wide Web - American Online (AOL.com), Yahoo!, Netscape, Excite.com, GeoCities - and others such as the Alta Vista search engine, @Home Network and the Prodigy Shopping Network.
"Amazon.com is and continues to be one of AOL's strongest partners," said Mr Bob Pittman, president and CEO of AOL Networks, which is the largest online service provider in the world.
Amazon's Web site offers a fast, easy search of a 2.5 million title catalogue by author, subject, title, keyword, ISBN (the worldwide standard number for identifying a particular edition of a book) and publication date by clicking on the Search Now button.
This catalogue is said to be 14 times larger than that of the biggest chain of bookshops, an advertising claim against which Barnes & Noble, a high-profile bookshop chain has filed suit.
The Amazon.com Gift Centre offers readers the chance to recommend and review books and even sends gift certificates to friends on paper or via e-mail including choosing the wrapping paper online.
People browsing can see lists of the top 10 sellers in hardcover and paperback, plus profiles of the best-selling authors and previews of soon to be released titles. They can also reserve copies early or sign up for personal notification services in which Amazon.com will send a monthly e-mail reviewing books that its editors believe are outstanding.
It offers discounts on 400,000 titles and special offers like 40 per cent off selected titles, 30 per cent off hard covers and 20 per cent off paperbacks. Buyers add books to a shopping cart and then proceed to the check-out where they use the standard ordering process to complete their order.
Five forms of credit cards are accepted - Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express and JCB - along with cheques and money orders denominated in US dollars and drawn on a US bank.
The Netscape Secure Commerce Server encrypts credit card information in transit so for every credit card purchase, Amazon.com offers a security guarantee.
It uses 1-Click technology so that once 1-Click ordering has been set on a consumer's computer, it will be activated for future orders. Information will come up such as the buyer's shipping address, method of shipping and payment information.
Although it has its headquarters in Seattle, last November Amazon.com opened a 200,000 sq ft distribution centre in New Castle, Delaware to serve the east coast of the US. From these two centres, it stocks and directly ships books to customers within 24 hours to two to three days.
Prompting Piper Jaffray of Minneapolis to call it the star performer of the 1997 IPO class, on May 14th last year Amazon.com went public on Nasdaq trading under the symbol AMZN. It had a strong debut, opening at $18 on its first day of trading and closed the year at $59, more than three times its IPO price.
The site was ranked the number one Internet site across shopping categories among both business and householder users in August 1997.
On December 29th, 1997, Amazon.com completed a $75 million, three-year credit facility led by Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, Inc. "This fully-funded credit facility provides Amazon.com with substantially increased resources to execute its long-term strategy," said Joy Covey, Amazon.com's chief financial officer.
To take a comment from the Economist of December 21st, 1996, "a store called Amazon is the toast of cyberspace".
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