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If you have still never bought any books online it may surprise you to know that Amazon.com is the world's largest book retailer - outselling all of the retailers that sell books in brick and mortar stores. Your identity, credit cards, and personal history are secure when shopping online and thanks to Amazon, as they have led the way since the phenomenal growth of the internet.

The story of Amazon.com is truly one to marvel at. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com started the business in 1994 selling books out of his own garage in Washington. A friend and businessman Nick Hanauer loaned Bezos $40,000 to start the venture. After a few short years of limited success, Bezos surmised that to get return customers, he had to make Amazon more than just about books, but about community and so he added a book review feature. People loved it and by 1997, Amazon.com had generated $15.7 million in revenue.

Success fueled another success and when they went public Bezos and his team added CDs and movies to their inventory, and a year later expanded their offerings even further by adding software, electronics, video games, toys, and home improvement items.
By the end of 1999, Amazon had tracked over a billion dollars in sales.

One defining moment for Amazon.com came when Bezos implemented his latest idea – recruiting other companies to sell their products through Amazon. Now retailers, brand makers and all sorts of businesses, sell their products through amazon.com, with Bezos’ company taking in a piece of the profits.

Today, amazon.com still sells books. But they also carry thousands upon thousands of items under categories such as Movies, Music, and games; Digital Downloads; computers and office; electronics; home and garden, Grocery health and beauty; toys, kids and baby; apparel shoes and jewelry; Sports and Outdoors; Tools, auto and industrial.

Web Services
But Bezos didn’t stop there. By early 2006, Amazon.com had launched Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a cloud computing service that provides companies of all sizes with IT infrastructure web services to power their processing power needs, and digital storage among others.
AWS basically rents out massive databasing capabilities, computing capabilities, storage capabilities and web service (such as payment processing, inventory processing etc.) to any company that needs it. Companies pay only for the capabilities they consume on a monthly basis, without the need to lay down their own capital to build and maintain servers, everything is done via Amazon’s AWS infrastructure.

The Kindle
A new offering, one that has met significant demand is Amazon’s self branded electronic book/electronic media content reader, the Amazon Kindle. This is a standalone wireless, portable reading device that gives the owner access to more than 200,000 books in Amazon’s e-book servers. It can also subscribe instantly to blogs, newspapers, and magazines partnered with Amazon.com.
Customer demand for this little device has been short of amazing for Amazon, as it is currently sold out with massive waiting lists getting longer by the day. It is hard to predict what Amazon.com will morph into next, but rest assured, we will be seeing more new things from the formerly books only store.