Amazon.com

Amazon.com

The internet has evolved a lot lately and we can say there is an icon site for every internet’s area of interest. If you ask around about a search engine most people will tell you about google.com, if you’re looking for a free email provider you will hear of yahoo.com and hotmail.com, if you need to find videos youtube.com will be the first recommended to you. But what if you want to make some online shopping? Well, in this case the first place to visit is amazon.com.

Started in 1994 as a bookstore the site evolved to a more complex online shop where you can find today quite everything that can be sold: food, toys, clothes, electronics and everything else you can think about. Beginning with the year 2000 the logo was changed into an arrow, in a smile shape, leading from A to Z, representing that amazon.com can offer you everything on sale and guarantees customer’s satisfaction (the smile).

The interface software allows you to browse the listed products by price, date, area of interest or any other way you please. An extra service provided by amazon.com is the shipping of certain products, but this works only in some countries. People ca also review other people’s products. Related to this, in 2004 an accidental error showed the reviewer’s names and it turned out that some authors have been …let’s say “caught” writing outstanding reviews on their own books.
A success of amazon.com was the launch in 2007 of an internet music store offering the possibility to buy downloadable versions of certain mp3 format files. Years before that the company launched an auctions service in 1999 that seems to have failed and was completely removed. Still, amazon.com increased its revenues and managed to reach an over $15 billion sales in 2008. It seems the traffic of the site was much over 500 million visitors in 2008 (around 615 million).
Some of the sites that amazon.com bought over the years are IMDb, Alexa Internet, CD Now and Audible.com.