Almost 50 cents of every retail dollar Americans spend online now goes to Amazon – the company had 47% of the retail e-commerce market share in 2020, and that number is projected to reach 50% in 2021. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many retailers large and small have decimated. Amazon has done well, capturing much of the lucrative online and delivery markets. The company accounted for nearly a third of all ecommerce sales in the United States in 2020. To handle the surge in online sales, Amazon added hundreds of thousands of workers and passed the 1 million employee mark in late 2020.
The company has more than 150 million Prime subscribers. Despite paying for “free” two-day shipping for a long time, Prime members now also get a huge library of entertainment, e-books, grocery services, cloud storage, and games. The early investors who bought into the company when it went public saw a surge of near-unprecedented growth – those who made an initial investment of just $ 1,000 are now millionaires.
Amazon ranks among the five largest companies in America, and its founder is the second richest person in the world, who just lost his first place to Elon Musk. It is responsible for starting a trend that breaks the foundations of traditional retailing and changes the way things are bought and sold. Former giants like Sears and Toys “R” Us collapsed under the pressure of e-commerce, a revolution that Amazon started more than any other entity – but it hasn’t always been that way.
When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in his garage in 1994, the company he founded was not profitable for years to come. It was part of an avalanche of new tech startups riding a wave of new and unsafe technologies – most of them would go broke quickly. It started with the idea of letting people browse and buy books from their computers instead of going to physical bookstores and choosing from the limited selections they could find in them. It was a revolutionary idea, and Amazon soon became the largest bookstore in the world. Then it became the “Everything Store”. It later became a machine that created wealth. Tentacles ranged from electric vehicles to cloud computing to production studios and grocery stores. It is heavily questioned and controversial – plans to open a new headquarters have simultaneously sparked fierce bidding wars and violent political setbacks.
Stacker has compiled a list of key moments in the history of Amazon and its current business from various sources. Here’s a look at the events that turned an online bookstore into a global conglomerate and a self-made entrepreneur into the second richest man in the world.
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