- Amazon provides e-commerce, cloud, streaming, and digital advertising services.
- The company started as an online bookseller and went public three years later.
- Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, and its current CEO is Andy Jassy.
Amazon is a massive tech company that provides e-commerce, cloud, streaming, and digital advertising services.
In 1997, when Amazon stock hit the market, the company was a 3-year-old online bookseller with no clear path to profitability. It faced a growing list of competitors that included Simon & Schuster and Barnes & Noble, each of which was already selling books online.
The AMZN stock price has increased significantly since, and for the last three quarters, Amazon earnings have beaten analyst expectations.
There have been four Amazon stock splits in the company's history.
Digital Services
Amazon has diversified well beyond physical books, starting with digital books. Kindle Unlimited is an Amazon subscription service that lets you check out as many as 20 Kindle ebooks at a time and read them at your own pace.
The company also expanded into audiobooks by purchasing Audible in 2008. Amazon Audible lets you stream its library of audiobooks, podcasts, and more.
Amazon has even branched out into book publishing. Amazon's self-publishing platform Kindle Direct Publishing, or KDP, lets authors self-publish in both print and digital. Amazon says writers can earn up to a 70% royalty rate for eBook sales and up to 60% for print.
Apart from the world of reading, the company may be best known for Amazon Prime, the monthly subscription service that offers free, fast shipping. As Prime evolved, more digital products and perks emerged as well.
Amazon Photos is a secure online storage option for photos and videos. A Prime membership includes unlimited photo storage and 5 GB of video storage. Video storage can be upgraded for users who need more space.
Prime Gaming might not be the most well-known benefit, but for gamers, it comes with perks including downloadable games, in-game content, and Twitch subscriptions.
Amazon Music has three pricing tiers: Amazon Music Free, Amazon Music Prime, and Amazon Music Unlimited. The middle option, Amazon Music Prime, is free with Amazon Prime. (The first is free for everyone, and the third is a paid subscription.)
Amazon Products
Just as retail giants like Walmart sometimes have pharmacies in their stores, Amazon Pharmacy is Amazon's destination for buying medications online. Amazon Prime members can sign up for the subscription service RxPass to get multiple generic medications delivered each month for a fee of $5/month.
Amazon Outlet is the place to go for overstocked and clearance items across all product categories on Amazon. From out-of-season household items or miscellaneous gadgets, Amazon Outlet provides a selection of discounted goods that casual shoppers might otherwise miss.
The site even offers a destination for hosting your wedding registry.
Extra perks for Prime members who use the Amazon wedding registry include a 20% discount for any unpurchased registry gifts (as long as your guests purchased at least $500 worth of gifts from the registry), free shipping on eligible items over $25, and a 180-day return policy.
Expectant parents can take advantage of Amazon's baby registry. Once a new registry is created, 10 unique items are added. At least $10 has been spent (before shipping and taxes), Amazon will send registrants who belong to Prime a free welcome box as a gift "with full, travel, and sample-size surprises for parents and baby" to the address supplied during registry creation.
For a while, Amazon customers could support their favorite charities while shopping on Amazon. AmazonSmile was launched in 2013 and later closed in February 2023. When the program was live, 0.5% of purchases made through Smile went to a user's chosen charity.
AWS
Amazon Web Services — or AWS — is a division of Amazon that offers cloud computing services and application programming interfaces to large and small companies, government agencies, and individuals.
The AWS Console is a web app that gives AWS users access to a set of services and tools for managing AWS resources. Using the console, you can manage online resources, billing, security, and more.
The AWS platform is so prolific that an AWS certification is now a tool to level up your career. An AWS certification is a title granted to people who successfully complete an exam, and they can then use the title on business cards, email footers, letterheads, and elsewhere.
Similarly, so many businesses use AWS that an AWS outage can bring wide swaths of an industry to a standstill. Popular video streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ use AWS, for example, and in recent AWS outages, those services were unavailable, or streaming was intermittent for many subscribers.
Amazon Stores
Amazon launched in July 1994, billing itself as "Earth's Biggest Bookstore." That was appropriate since the first iteration of the website only sold books, yet it had no brick-and-mortar retail presence. Even as Amazon expanded its inventory, adding music CDs in 1998 and a broad selection of other products in the following years, the brand remained an online-only retailer.
All that changed in 2015 when Amazon opened its first Amazon Books retail location. The Amazon Books physical store chain operated for seven years but announced in 2022 that all locations would close.
Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market in 2017 for $13.7 billion after the grocery store chain ran into financial trouble and sought a buyer. Whole Foods Market's founder and CEO John Mackey wrote in his 2020 book "Conscious Leadership" that the grocery chain had seen declining sales for several quarters and that activist investors had planned a takeover.
Next, Amazon opened its first Amazon Go store in 2018, allowing shoppers to quickly grab snacks, coffee, groceries, and meals. The stores use Just Walk Out technology, which eliminates the need for shoppers to stand in lines, scan their items, or handle physical cash and credit cards to make a payment.
Amazon has also bet big on its hybrid online and brick-and-mortar grocery store, Amazon Fresh, opening its first Fresh store in 2020. There are 40 physical Amazon Fresh stores across eight states. Amazon Fresh stocks national and local brands, as well as its own store brands, including Happy Belly and Fresh brand. You can also purchase 365 by Whole Foods brand groceries.
Buying and Selling
Amazon can support your business in two ways: the first is by helping keep your workplace supplied with all the material goods you could need. The second is facilitating sales of products that can put profits right into your account.
An Amazon business is, ironically, quite distinct from Amazon Business. The latter is an area of Amazon where office supplies, janitorial goods, IT hardware, and more are purchased. The former refers to any business that's making money by selling merchandise with the support of Amazon.
Becoming an Amazon seller can be as simple or scaled as you want to make it. You can ship, sell, and promote your own products — or act as more of an intermediary.
With the Amazon dropshipping model, your business is the forward-facing party customers see. Meanwhile, a third party handles the physical logistics. You make money by setting a higher price for customers than the price you got from your supplier.
Though the terms are used interchangeably, there are key differences between an Amazon warehouse and an Amazon fulfillment center. An Amazon warehouse typically refers to locations where open-box, refurbished, and recently returned items are sold, often at discounted prices.
However, Amazon fulfillment centers primarily focus on new inventory. They are responsible for receiving, storing, and shipping products for various sellers using the Fulfillment by Amazon service.
Amazon FBA enables Amazon sellers to leverage Amazon's vast network of warehouses, order processing systems, and customer service. Through FBA, Amazon takes on the heavy lifting of labeling, packing, and shipping to customers on the sellers' behalf. Products in FBA also get a badge that appeals more to Amazon Prime subscribers.
Purchasing Products
For those curious about recent Amazon orders, the company offers a streamlined way to view your order history.
In many cases, you can use Amazon tracking to see the exact location of your package on the day of delivery. You can see exactly where it is on a map, and get a status update indicating how many stops away it is from your address.
For people worried about porch theft, an Amazon Hub Locker could be the solution. A safe and secure drop-off location hosted by local retailers, Amazon Hub is a network of secure pickup locations for Amazon deliveries. They're generally located in shipping centers, retail stores, and shopping malls.
People of Amazon
Starting late last year and lasting into this spring, Amazon layoffs slashed roughly 27,000 jobs at the company.
However, available Amazon jobs still number in the hundreds for full-time, seasonal, and part-time roles. This fall, several roles were listed as available to employees seeking virtual or hybrid work despite an internal fight over how often Amazon employees should show up in person.
For those who have to go into the office, there are several hubs and two Amazon headquarters. Amazon's original headquarters is in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle. Amazon's secondary headquarters is in the National Landing neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia.
Amazon also utilizes thousands of drivers who are actually contractors. Amazon Flex drivers help the company complete its last-mile deliveries or packages reaching their final destinations at customers' doorsteps. These deliveries include orders from Amazon.com, Prime Now, Amazon Fresh, and pick-up orders from local stores. These drivers are independent contractors.
The Flex program is separate from the Amazon delivery drivers within the company's Delivery Service Partners program. These DSP logistics firms work out of Amazon shipment facilities and employ the drivers, while Amazon provides drivers with branded uniforms and vehicles.
Another large contingent of workers at Amazon are warehouse employees. Workers at warehouses and fulfillment centers have made several attempts to form or join unions. An Amazon union was initially created in 2021 by a group of labor activists called the Congress of Essential Workers. Eventually, from that group, Amazon workers in Staten Island voted to unionize as the Amazon Labor Union in 2022.
Workers at a Seattle Amazon Fresh grocery store launched a union push in 2022, seeking higher pay, more flexible attendance policies, longer breaks, and other benefits. A group of Amazon delivery drivers in California, who contract with Amazon, unionized in 2023 and negotiated their first contract with the Teamsters Union.
Amazon's CEO has said he believes union representation would not benefit the company's legion of workers.
Andy Jassy took over as CEO in 2021 as unionization efforts were getting underway. Before Jassy, Amazon only had one CEO since its founding in 1994.
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 after a road trip from New York to Washington.
With a 12-figure net worth, Bezos is one of few living people who can say they have held the title of richest person on the planet.
Bezos's first wife was MacKenzie Scott. The couple was married for 25 years and have four children together: three sons and one daughter.
Bezos' girlfriend, now fiancee, Lauren Sanchez, is a former reporter and a licensed helicopter pilot running an aerial production company.
Bezos' yacht set sail this summer for the first time, with the former CEO and Sanchez crisscrossing Europe to show it off.
