In the first two months of business, Amazon sold to all 50 states and over 45 countries. The first book sold on was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. In July 1995, Amazon opened as an online bookseller, selling the world's largest collection of books to anyone with World Wide Web access. Bezos' parents invested almost $250,000 in the start-up. Amazon was founded in the garage of Bezos' rented home in Bellevue, Washington. Bezos finally decided that his new business would sell books online, because of the large worldwide demand for literature, the low unit price for books, and the huge number of titles available in print. He narrowed the list to what he felt were the five most promising products, which included: compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos, and books. Īfter reading a report about the future of the Internet that projected annual web commerce growth at 2,300%, Bezos created a list of 20 products that could be marketed online. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world.'.

A lot of it comes down to the brand name. And it's still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand and told a reporter, 'There's nothing about our model that can't be copied over time. Additionally, a name that began with 'A' was preferred because it would probably be at the top of an alphabetized list.

The Amazon River, he noted, was the biggest river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest bookstore in the world. Choosing a name īezos selected the name by looking through a dictionary he settled on 'Amazon' because it was a place that was 'exotic and different', just as he had envisioned for his Internet enterprise. In its early days, the company was operated out of the garage of Bezos's house on Northeast 28th Street in Bellevue, Washington. After a few months, he changed the name to, Inc, because a lawyer misheard its original name as 'cadaver'. On July 5, 1994, Bezos initially incorporated the company in Washington state with the name Cadabra, Inc. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he began to work on a business plan for what would become. In 1994, Bezos left his employment as vice-president of D. The company was created as a result of what Jeff Bezos called his 'regret minimization framework', which described his efforts to fend off any regrets for participating sooner in the Internet business boom during that time.

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