Amazon.com, Inc. was created by entrepreneur Jeff Bezos in the early 1990s. The company was original named Cadabra.com and was registered on July 4, 1994. Shortly thereafter, Bezos changed the name to Amazon.com which was officially (re)registered on November 1, 1994. Amazon was originally designed as an email-based bookstore. Customers would email Amazon their orders, and books were procured only after a customer requested them. However, Bezos already had bigger and better ideas and began preparing for an internet-based store in during the first year in business. The Amazon.com website went live on July 16, 1995, and users took to it immediately. The first two weeks the website was live, Amazon brought in $26,000 in sales. (Stone, 2013, p. 40) Amazon Grows Within a year of the site going live, Amazon’s revenues were growing 30 to 40 percent a month. Then, after an article about the company was published in the Wall Street Journal in May of 1996, sales jumped 200 percent. (Stone, 2013, p. 46) Amazon immediately started hiring, they upgraded their technology infrastructure and moved into larger quarters. Bezos began looking for investors to increase Amazon’s capital and the focus became expanding the company to be the market leader, regardless of profits. “This growth …show more content…
He laid off large portions of his workforce and unloaded unnecessary and underperforming areas of the business. He then got to making agreements with a number of companies, where Amazon would host the website for a physical retailer in return for exclusively selling their products. It provided the leverage he needed to start moving up, but the agreements didn’t last long due to violations of the agreements on the part of both Amazon and the companies it had agreements with. The combination of these “stepping stone” agreements and cutting back on operating costs led Amazon to turn finally turn a