Amazon.com Launch

Amazon began as a bookstore that held little inventory and grew into the company that set modern expectations for fast, cheap delivery. Bezos chose books because millions of titles could be listed online while no physical store could stock them all, and many early orders were filled with books bought from distributors after customers ordered. As sales grew, Amazon built its own fulfillment centers in the late 1990s. That shift from sourcing each order to running owned warehouses, and later to renting space in them to other merchants, is the path from a website to today's Fulfillment by Amazon and Prime delivery promises.

• Fulfillment CenterFCWarehouse built for small customer orders
• Fulfillment by AmazonFBAAmazon stores and ships your orders
• DropshippingSupplier ships orders for the seller

• Jeff Bezosb. 1964 · Founder of Amazon
• Michael Aldrich1941–2014 · Inventor of teleshopping

• First Secure Online Purchase1994 · An encrypted card payment buys a Sting CD online
• Sears, Roebuck Catalog1888–1993 · A watch catalog grows into a US mail-order giant
• Dot-Com Boom and Bust1995–2001 · Internet stocks soar to a 2000 peak, then crash

• Quill Corp. v. North Dakota1992, overruled 2018 · 1992 case requiring physical presence for sales tax

1. Amazon (company) (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org
2. Amazon's long-term growth (Statista) statista.com