Amazon was founded in 1994, spurred by what Bezos called "regret minimization framework", his effort to fend off regret for not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush. Company lore says Bezos wrote the business plan while he and his wife drove from New York to Seattle, although that account appears to be apocryphal.Bezos flew from New York to Texas, where he picked up a car from a family member, and then drove from Texas to Seattle.
The company began as an online bookstore; while the largest brick-and-mortar bookstores and mail-order catalogs for books might offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could offer more. Bezos named the company "Amazon" after the world's largest river. Since 2000, Amazon's logotype is an arrow leading from A to Z, representing customer satisfaction (as it forms a smile); a goal was to have every product in the alphabet.
Amazon was incorporated in 1994, in the state of Washington. In July 1995, the company began service and sold its first book on amazon.com - Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. In 1996, it was reincorporated in Delaware. Amazon issued its initial public offering of stock on May 15, 1997, trading under the NASDAQ stock exchange symbol AMZN, at an IPO price of US$18.00 per share ($1.50 after three stock splits in the late 1990s).
Amazon's initial business plan was unusual: the company did not expect a profit for four to five years. Its "slow" growth provoked stockholder complaints that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough. When the dot-com bubble burst, and many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered, and finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million or 1¢ per share, on revenues of more than $1 billion, but the modest profit was important in demonstrating the business model could be profitable. In 1999, Time magazine named Bezos Person of the Year, recognizing the company's success in popularizing online shopping.

Amazon.com has offices, fulfillment centers, customer service centers and software development centers across North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia
Headquarters


amazon.com's headquarters in the PacMed building in Beacon Hill, Seattle.
The company's global headquarters are located on Seattle's Beacon Hill. It has offices throughout other parts of greater Seattle, including Union Station and The Columbia Center.
Amazon has announced plans to move its headquarters to the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle beginning in mid-2010, with full occupancy by 2011. This move will consolidate all Seattle employees onto the new 11-building campus.

The company employs software developers in centers across the globe. While much of Amazon's software development is in Seattle, other locations include Slough and Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Dublin (Ireland), Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad (India), Cape Town (South Africa), Iaşi (Romania), Shibuya, Tokyo (Japan), Beijing (China), and Tempe, Arizona (United States).

Fulfillment centers are located in the following cities, often near airports. None are within 500 miles (800 km) of Amazon's headquarters in Seattle. These centers also provide warehousing and order-fulfillment for third-party sellers:
North America:
USA: Phoenix and Goodyear, AZ; New Castle, DE; Whitestown and Plainfield, IN; Coffeyville, KS; Campbellsville, Hebron (near CVG), Lexington, and Louisville, KY; Fernley and North Las Vegas, NV; Nashua, NH; Carlisle, Hazleton, Allentown, and Lewisberry, PA; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Sterling, VA
These U.S. distribution centers have been closed: Red Rock, Nevada; Chambersburg, Pennsylvania; and Munster, Indiana.
Canada: Ontario, Mississauga - Canada Post facility
Europe:
Amazon.co.uk warehouse, Glenrothes.
England: Marston Gate, near Brogborough, Bedfordshire
Scotland: Gourock, Inverclyde; Glenrothes, Fife
Wales: Crymlyn Burrows, Swansea near Jersey Marine
France: Orléans, Loiret - Boigny (2000), Saran (2007)
Germany: Bad Hersfeld, Hesse; Leipzig, Saxony
Asia:
Japan: Ichikawa and Yachiyo, Chiba; Sakai, Osaka; Kawagoe, Saitama
China: Guangzhou, Suzhou, Beijing

Amazon at one time carried two cockfighting magazines and two dog fighting videos although the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) contends that the sale of these materials is a violation of U.S. Federal law and filed a lawsuit against Amazon. A campaign to boycott Amazon was August 2007 gained attention after a dog fighting case involving NFL quarterback Michael Vick. In May 2008, Marburger Publishing agreed to settle with the Humane Society by requesting that Amazon stop selling their magazine, The Game Cock. The second magazine named in the lawsuit, The Feathered Warrior, remained available.
In April 2009 it was publicized that some erotic, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, feminist and politically liberal books were being excluded from Amazon's sales rankings. Various books and media were flagged as "Adult content," including children's books, self-help books, non-fiction, and non-explicit fiction. As a result, works by established authors E. M. Forster, Gore Vidal, Jeanette Winterson and D. H. Lawrence were unranked. The change first received publicity on the blog of author Mark R. Probst, who reproduced an e-mail from Amazon describing a policy of de-ranking "adult" material. However, Amazon later said that there was no policy of de-ranking LGBT material and blamed the change first on a "glitch" and then on "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" that had affected 57,310 books.
In September 2009 it emerged that Amazon was selling MP3 music downloads falsely suggesting a well-known Premier League football manager was a child sex offender. Despite a campaign urging the retailer to withdraw the item, they refused to do so, citing freedom of speech.The company was then forced to withdraw the item when legal action was threatened. However, they continued to sell the item on their American, German and French websites

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2.Pentru cei care au cumparat,a fost greu sa cumparati?
3.E mai bun ebay decit amazon,si de ce?