Frequently seen as the largest internet retailer globally, Amazon is a US cloud service and online shopping platform established by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994. The company’s main office is situated in Seattle and provides a variety of products including books, music, furniture, clothing, beauty supplies, electronics, and more. Products on Amazon are sold at a low price, thereby, transforming shopping for its customers. Amazon partners with a lot of brands in order to offer a variety of products for its customers to select.
The company with its humble beginning which can be traced to the founder’s garage, has now grown into a multitude of service categories which is how it got its byname, “the Everything Store”. Its ultimate aim according to Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings is to “improve all aspects of the customer experience, including lowering prices, improving availability, offering faster delivery times, increasing selection, expanding product information, improving ease of use, and earning customer trust.”
In 1990 when the company just started, Jeff Bezos registered it as Cadabra but was eventually changed to Amazon as it depicted the purpose of its creation more and gave it more importance. In the 2000s, Amazon offered two-day shipping within the US for its members in the year 2005. Moving forward in 2006, it launched its first Amazon Web Series (AWS) that provides services for websites and customer side applications, and also Unbox—a cloud computing and video-on-demand service. Fast forward to 2007, it launched Kindle e-reader, which helped shape the way people read the books they buy. From 2010 till date, Amazon has launched a lot of other services that have helped widen the scope of the company in line with its purpose. The Amazon Fire TV Stick (2011), Amazon Art marketplace for fine art( 2013), also the popular in-home assistant —Alexa— in 2016, with a whole lot of other things.
Over the last three decades, the global retail company has created more jobs and invested over $530 billion in the US. It has gone as far as supporting millions of jobs in different fields like construction and hospitality and has also helped the community largely by responding to the urgent need of helping to reduce homelessness, and hunger and investing in the citizens, especially in the educational sector for children and young adults. Apart from these major contributions and achievements, Amazon, as an organization has won a lot of awards to indicate its selfless services to its customers. Some of the awards include the following just to name a few; #5 Fast Company World’s Most Innovative Companies, 2017-2018; Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators, 2019-2020; #4 Forbes World’s Most Valuable Brands, 2019-2020; Careers and the Disabled Magazine Top 50 Employers, 2020; TIME Magazine’s TIME100 Most Influential Companies, 2021; #5 Most Trusted Brands Globally by Morning Consult, 2021; Italy, Spain, France, Poland Top Employer 2022; Trustworthy Brand title in Poland in 2023; Amazon named as a “Top Employer 2023” in Europe.
The story of Amazon has been that of immense expansion and reinvention. Now after over 30 years since its humble beginning and the extent of growth, there is only one question in the mind of the populace; What’s next for the Everything company? Is this the end of the expansion or is there more to come?
However, all the expansion and inventions can only make us try to guess what is in the mind of Jeff Bezos for his company in years to come. Some of the future predictions of Amazon are;
- With its continued innovation that could probably lead to new products and services, Amazon’s commerce revenue in years to come would possibly be in thousands or hundreds of dollars.
- Amazon is expected to be a gigantic eBay-like marketplace with good management and functionality.
- Amazon is expected to be one of the biggest cloud-computing companies as it is already the biggest provider of certain types of cloud-computing and likes to give excellent voluminous execution at a cheap rate.
- Some of Amazon’s services and products made us realize that Amazon embraces disruption, which makes it possible for Amazon to go into Shapeways which can build and ship 3D printing designs, even when 3D printing is Amazon’s threat at the moment.
- There is a huge possibility that Amazon will sell digital media even if some of the efforts (music and video) to do so at the moment have not been possible but some have ( kindle).
To sum up, Amazon as a global organization has a bright future as it is expanding into new markets around the world and has a strong brand that is recognized by people around the world with good services convincing enough to retain existing customers and gain thousands of new customers, which typically means growth.
