Incorporated in early July 1994 as “Cadabra” Jeff Bezos, its founder changed
the name to Amazon a year later after a lawyer misheard its original name as “cadaver”. In September of 1994, Bezos purchased the Domaine Name “Relentless.com” and briefly considered naming his new online store Relentless, but several friends told him the name sounded a bit too sinister. The domain name Relentless.com is still owned by Bezos and still redirects to the Amazon.com retail site — try it: www.relentless.com to be sure.
Regardless the company went online as Amazon.com in 1995 as an online Book Store and today (2016) is the largest Internet-based retailer in the world!
Amazon has separate retail websites for the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland; plus Australia, Brazil, China, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain. Most recently, in 2016, Dutch and Polish language versions of the German Amazon (amazon.de) website were launched.
Amazon lets practically anyone sell almost anything using its platform. Not surprisingly Amazon has an affiliate program that lets nearly anybody (even this blog site) display Amazon links on their site and earn a tiny commission on “click-through” sales. In addition, there is now a program which allows those same affiliates to build entire websites based on the Amazon platform. Sooo, if you’re gonna buy from Amazon anyway, we’d be especially pleased if you’d make it a habit to use one of our links to get there!
Then there’s “Amazon Prime” . . . nearly half of U.S. households have it! To be more specific, nearly 46% of U.S. households have at least one member. So what is Amazon Prime? It’s known for two big things: free two-day shipping and Netflix-style video streaming; decidedly worthwhile perks, especially when considering the $99.00 annual subscription charge, but a Prime membership offers more than just free shipping and streaming.
First you need to know the Prime’s free shipping applies to most of Amazon's physical goods and they will be shipped to your door within two days, provided you live in the contiguous US. What's especially noteworthy about this is that there's no minimum order requirement, so even if you buy a $5 HDMI cable, it'll arrive within 48 hours; some residents with ZIP codes that are close to distribution centers can enjoy same-day delivery at no extra charge, so as long as the order totals at least $35.00.
Second, Prime Video, as noted above, is akin to Netflix, offering movies, TV shows, and original content. It's accessible on practically all mobile devices and most streaming sticks and boxes (the exception being Apple TV). However, Prime has one huge advantage beyond similar programs: many TV shows, and some movies can be downloaded to your PC, phone, or tablet for “offline” viewing.
Other noteworthy Amazon Prime benefits include but are not limited too: Ad-free access to a music library stocked with over 2,000,000 tracks, unlimited cloud storage for photos, access to “Amazon Elements” which offers an assortment of baby products, the “Kindle First” program — wherein each month, Amazon editors select six new, yet-to-be-released Kindle book editions and give Prime subscribers the opportunity to pick one of them at no cost . . . and that’s for keeps, too; you're not just borrowing the book . . . and the list of Amazon Prime benefits continues on and on.
On December 1 of 2013, CEO Jeff Bezos revealed plans for “Amazon PrimeAir” in an interview on the popular TV news show, 60 Minutes. PrimeAir has plans to fly individual packages via Miniature Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV’s) to a customer’s doorstep within 30 minutes of ordering. Most experts today (2016) agree the biggest hurdle facing the proposed delivery technique is that commercial use of UAV’s, (otherwise known as drones) is not yet legal in the United States.
Most likely, for competitive reasons, Amazon does not release gross sales figures to the public and of course, Amazon has yet to report fourth-quarter earnings for 2016, but top analysts forecast that its revenue for the full year (2016) will reach $107 Billion; that’s up 21% from 2014.
Shopping for most anything is undoubtedly going online, a place that is currently dominated by Amazon, which (2016) accounts for about 25% of all online sales . . . suddenly it seems to make a whole lot of sense to avoid the never-ending traffic congestion and the crowds associated with a trip to the mall.
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