What is Amazon

 

What is Amazon?

The world's largest online retailer and prominent cloud service provider are Amazon (Amazon.com).

Amazon, which began as an online bookselling business, is now primarily focused on providing e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence (AI) services on the internet.

The company follows a sales strategy called "Amazon to the buyer." It has a huge selection of products and a lot of inventory, so customers can buy almost anything, like clothes, beauty products, gourmet food, jewelry, books, movies, electronics, pet supplies, furniture, toys, garden supplies, and household goods.

Amazon has individual websites, software development centers, customer service centers, data centers, and fulfillment centers worldwide, with its headquarters in Seattle.

Amazon's history and timeline Since Jeff Bezos founded the company on July 5, 1994, in his garage in Bellevue, Washington, it has come a long way.

An overview of Amazon's development from its humble beginnings into a multinational business empire is provided in the following chronology.

On July 16, 1995, Amazon officially launched as an online bookseller in the 1990s. Bezos started the business as Cadabra, but he later changed the name to Amazon. It is said that Bezos looked for an A-sounding word in a dictionary to learn the significance of alphabetical order. As a reference to his plan to have the company's size mirror that of the Amazon River, one of the world's largest rivers, he chose the name Amazon because it was exotic and unique. The slogan of the business has always been "get big fast."

The 2000s: In 2005, Amazon Prime was launched. This membership-based service for Amazon customers offers streaming, shopping, and reading benefits in addition to free two-day shipping within the contiguous United States. The current cost of an Amazon Prime membership is $139 per year or $14.99 per month, according to Amazon's website.

Amazon Web Services is another cloud computing platform that was established in the 2000s. To provide online services for websites and client-side applications, the initial offerings of Amazon Web Services (AWS) were made available in 2006. The company's expanding portfolio of web services is supported by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). Unbox, Amazon's cloud computing and video-on-demand service at the time, was also launched in the same year.

 

With the introduction of its first e-reader, the Kindle, in 2007, Amazon not only changed how people bought books, but it also changed how they read them. The Kindle Store's electronic books, magazines, and newspapers can be browsed, purchased, and read with this device.

From the 2010s to the present, Amazon released its first tablet computer, the Kindle Fire, in 2011. In 2014, the company released the Amazon Fire TV Stick, which is a component of Amazon's extensive line of streaming media devices.

 

In 2013, Amazon also launched an online marketplace for fine arts called Amazon Art. This marketplace has original works by well-known artists like Claude Monet and Norman Rockwell.

 

In 2015, the popular in-home virtual assistant Amazon Alexa was made available to consumers, and in 2016, the Echo Dot with Alexa was released.

 

In 2017, Amazon bought Whole Foods, a natural food store, and in 2018, it opened Amazon Go, a chain of cashless grocery stores.

 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of in-home shopping increased consumers' reliance on Amazon, and this trend is likely to continue.

Products and services that stand out from the competition Amazon have a wide range of goods and services to choose from. A list of its most notable offerings is provided below.

Amazon Marketplace • Retail Third-party retailers can showcase and sell their products alongside Amazon items thanks to the e-commerce platform that Amazon uses.

• Prime Fresh Nearly a dozen U.S. Cities and a few international locations currently offer the grocery pickup and delivery service offered by Amazon. Either the Amazon mobile app or the Amazon Fresh website can be used to place an order for groceries. Customers can pick up their groceries at the store or have them delivered.

• Vine on Amazon. Since its inception in 2007, Amazon Vine has assisted publishers and manufacturers in obtaining product reviews so that customers can make educated purchasing decisions.

•          Woot. Woot, which was acquired by Amazon in 2010, offers special deals that are only available for a limited time and change daily. Refurbished and out-of-stock new items can be found in this shop. Shipping for Prime members is free.

• Amazon. 2009 saw Amazon acquire Zappos. Nike, Adidas, Sperry, and Uggs are just a few of the many brands that this footwear and apparel online retailer carries.

• Products from Amazon This service for printing T-shirts on demand lets sellers make and upload their designs for free and get paid for each sale. From printing the T-shirts to delivering them to customers, Amazon takes care of the rest.

• Handmade by Amazon Using this platform, artisans can sell handmade goods to customers all over the world.

• Amazon Kindle, technology for consumers The Kindle, Amazon's first e-reader, lets users browse, purchase, and read e-books, newspapers, and magazines from the Kindle Store.

• The tablet Amazon Fire The well-known and well-known Fire tablet from Amazon competes with the iPad from Apple.

• The Amazon FireTV A high-definition television that is paired with this line of Amazon's streaming media players and digital devices receives video content that has been streamed over the internet.

• Alexa by Amazon This AI-powered, cloud-based, voice-controlled personal assistant is made to answer questions, talk to users, and do other things and give commands.

• The Amazon Echo This is a smart home device from Amazon that connects to Alexa and comes with a speaker. The weather can be talked about, shopping lists can be made, and Amazon Echo can control other smart devices like televisions, lights, and switches.

• Echo Dot from Amazon An Echo Dot is a smaller, puck-shaped version of the original Amazon Echo that can answer questions, play music, and read news and other stories. It can be placed in any room.

• The Echo Show by Amazon The Amazon Echo Show is a speaker that works similarly with Alexa and has a touchscreen display of 7 inches. It can play videos and music and make video calls with other Echo users.

• Astro by Amazon The first Alexa-compatible home monitoring robot from Amazon. It is made to assist with a variety of household tasks, such as home monitoring, providing notifications and alerts to elderly caretakers, and following owners from room to room to play music, podcasts, or television shows.

Amazon Prime and other subscription services Members of this subscription service have access to discounts, exclusive shopping and entertainment services, and more. For instance, all qualifying orders receive free one-day or two-day shipping for Amazon Prime members.

• Prime Video on Amazon This is Amazon's on-demand video streaming service with over 2,100 TV shows and 24,000 movies to choose from. A membership to Amazon Prime comes with access to this service.

• Drive on Amazon. Amazon Drive, formerly known as Amazon Cloud Drive, is a cloud storage app that gives Amazon customers free, safe online storage for 5 gigabytes (GB) of photos, videos, and other files. Free, unlimited full-resolution photo storage and 5 GB of video storage are available to Amazon Prime members.

• Prime on Twitch. Twitch Prime is a subsidiary of Amazon Prime and is a monthly subscription service. It gives members premium access to Twitch, a video streaming platform that provides a social and entertaining way to watch people play games.

• Prime Music from Amazon This is a music streaming service that Prime members can use for free.

Amazon Pay and digital content Amazon Pay are a platform for online transaction processing that lets Amazon account holders, use their Amazon accounts to pay other online merchants.

• Unlimited Music from Amazon. The premium music service offered by Amazon costs $9.99 per month for non-Prime members and $8.99 per month for Prime members.

• The Amazon Store The Kindle Store, which is a part of Amazon's retail website, can be used to buy ebooks from any Kindle device.

• Android app store from Amazon. Users can download games and mobile apps to supported devices through Amazon's Android app store.

AWS

•          S3. This is the cloud-based, scalable object storage offered by Amazon. In S3, files are referred to as objects and stored in buckets, which are containers.

• Amazon SQS or Simple Queue Service SQS is a pay-per-use web service that allows users to access a message queue where messages can remain until they are processed by a computer.

• EC2 on Amazon In the AWS cloud, this web service interface offers scalability and resizable compute capacity. EC2 instances, or virtual servers, are available to users and can be scaled up or down to meet the needs of the network.

• Glacier on Amazon S3. A cloud storage service for data called Amazon S3 Glacier is inexpensive but may come with longer retrieval times. It also provides cold data backup and archiving.

• AWS Access Management and Identity Management, IAM grant resources controlled and secure access.

• Redshift at Amazon Using standard Structured Query Language queries, this cloud-based data warehouse lets users query petabytes of structured and semi-structured data. For instance, Nasdaq switched from a traditional on-premises data center to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, which is powered by the Amazon Redshift cluster, to accommodate the rising volume of transactions.

Amazon SageMaker and Amazon AI services Amazon SageMaker is a cloud machine learning platform that developers and data scientists can use to create, train, and deploy machine learning models for predictive analytics applications. The platform is fully managed by Amazon.

• Lex on Amazon The same technology that powers Alexa powers this service for incorporating voice and text-based conversational interfaces into any application.

• Polly from Amazon Amazon Polly is a service that converts text into spoken audio using deep learning technology. It has 60 voices speaking 29 languages.

• Recognition from Amazon. A deep learning algorithm is used to process images and extract information from them in this platform for facial recognition and analysis that is available as software as a service.

• DeepLens on AWS. Developers can easily experiment with machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things with this programmable video camera.

• Voice Service via Alexa To incorporate Amazon Alexa's speech and other capabilities into their applications and devices, this programming interface provides developers with a collection of C++ libraries.

• Transcribe on Amazon. Using automatic speech recognition, a deep learning technique, this service quickly and accurately converts speech to text.

• Google Translate. A cloud service called Amazon Translate can translate a lot of text written from one language to another.

• Kit for Alexa Skills On Amazon Alexa, developers can create skills or conversational applications using this software development kit.

Brands owned by Amazon privately include AmazonBasics. This is the low-budget private label of Amazon that primarily sells kitchen, technology, and household goods.

• Elements from Amazon. Nutritional supplements are included in this line of household goods in addition to health and personal care products.

• Mother Bear. Baby food, diaper pail refills, baby laundry detergent, and baby wipes are all available under this Amazon private label.

• Right on! Since its inception in 2016, this brand has expanded its product offering to include toilet paper and household paper towels.

• Essentials on Amazon. This clothing line, which is only available on Prime, has basic clothes for men, women, babies, and kids. There are also options for family, big and tall, and athletic activity.

• Full Belly This snack food-related Amazon private label was launched in 2016. The brand also started providing milk delivery services in February 2019.

• Threads for Good Only Amazon Prime members have access to this line of men's clothing. The label, which is considered to be of slightly higher quality and more stylish than the Amazon Essentials brand, offers both casual and professional pieces.

Notable Amazon acquisitions and subsidiaries From entertainment to healthcare, Amazon has tapped into a variety of industries to acquire numerous businesses over time.

The following is a list of notable Amazon subsidiary companies and acquisitions:

•          IMDb. In 1998, Amazon purchased the most widely used database for streaming online content, celebrities, video games, movies, and television shows.

• Auditory Amazon paid $300 million for the book and spoken audio content provider Audible in 2008.

• Amazon. In 2009, Amazon paid $1.2 billion for this online shoe and clothing retailer in an all-stock deal.

• Twitter Twitch, a social media and video game streaming platform, was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million.

• Wholesome Foods In 2017, Amazon paid $13.7 billion to acquire Whole Foods, a chain of organic, beverage, and food stores.

•          Ring. In 2018, this smart home and home security company was purchased by Amazon for $1 billion.

•          Zoox. In 2020, Amazon purchased a transportation, robotics, and autonomous vehicle company as a wholly-owned subsidiary for $1.2 billion.

• MGM Entertainment In March of 2022, Amazon paid $8.5 billion for this film and television studio.

Controversies and criticisms of Amazon Over the years, Amazon has faced a significant backlash from a variety of sources. The tech giant is also blamed for the Amazon effect, which is when the retail market changes and gets disrupted because the company acts like a monopoly.

Concerns and allegations that Amazon has faced over time include the following:

• Anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior. Amazon has been accused of replacing an open market with a privately controlled one because of its size and economies of scale, outpricing small and local merchants. The brick-and-mortar store model developed by companies like Sears and J.C. Penney is slowly dying as a result of this.

• Discrimination against employees. As a result of treating workers in its warehouses like robots, offering low wages, and creating unsafe working conditions, Amazon is frequently criticized.

• A significant carbon footprint Environmentalists have alleged that Amazon has had a staggering carbon footprint over the past two decades. Since Amazon delivers anything anywhere, it automatically creates a long-term carbon footprint that falls on its shoulders because shipping any product requires oil.

• E-waste ITV, a British television network, recently looked into how Amazon is destroying millions of unused or returned products to contribute to the global e-waste crisis. This also includes millions of electronics that are harmful to wildlife, water, the air, and soil, such as phones, computers, and televisions.

• Listings for counterfeit products. Because counterfeiters have been listing and selling fake products on Amazon through its third-party marketplace, the company has come under scrutiny from retailers, consumers, and lawmakers. In 2021, Amazon blocked 10 billion fake listings and destroyed 2 million counterfeit goods sent to its warehouses to combat counterfeit products on its website.

• Avoid paying taxes. Amazon has been criticized for frequently avoiding tax payments, despite making enormous profits and rapidly approaching monopoly status. The company was able to avoid paying approximately $5.2 billion in corporate federal income taxes in 2021, as stated in a report produced by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Amazon's finances According to a news release published on the investor relations website of the company, Amazon saw a decline in operating income in the first quarter of 2022 despite a significant rise in net sales.

From the release, the following are some notable statistics:

• Net sales increased by 7% in the first quarter, reaching $116.4 billion, compared to $108.5 billion in the first quarter of 2021. Net sales increased 9% compared to the first quarter of 2021, excluding the $1.8 billion negative effects of year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates that occurred during the quarter.

• In the first quarter of 2021, operating income was $8.9 billion, but it fell to $3.7 billion in the first quarter of this year.

• The first quarter's net loss was $3.8 billion, while the first quarter of 2021's net income was $8.1 billion.

In addition to being known as a business with interests in AI services, cloud computing, and e-commerce, Amazon also provides a wide range of subscription services. Discover the advantages of these services.