By
Man of Zeel
April 14, 2018
Amazon.com is well-known for its Kindle, lightning fast shipping, and selling virtually anything online.
The e-tailer's revenue totaled $61 billion in 2012 and it currently sits at No.5 on ComScore's list of top 2,000 domains on the web.
But did you know that the massive website started in founder Jeff Bezos' garage? Or that Amazon's operation has become so massive that it's warehouses have more square footage than 700 Madison Square Gardens?
Amazon.com was almost called "Cadabra" as in "Abracadabra". That idea was struck down because CEO Jeff Bezos' lawyer misheard the word as "cadaver".
Bezos chose Amazon.com for two reasons: one, to suggest scale (Amazon.com launched with the tagline "Earth's biggest book store") and two, back then website listings were often alphabetical.
Amazon owns 10 percent of North American E-Commerce. Office Depot, Stapes, Apple, Dell, WalMart, Sears, and Liberty all own another 10 percent of the market, the same size as Amazon. That leaves 1,000+ retailers to all fight for the remaining 80 percent.
Greg Linden a former Amazon employee who invented the recommendation engine described Amazon's initial frugality. Linden writes, "the quintessential example of Amazon's frugality was the door desk. Leave it to Jeff Bezos. Buy a wooden door, preferably a hollow core wooden door with no holes pre-drilled. Saw a couple 4" x 4" x 6' pillars in half. Bolt them to the door with a couple of scary looking angle brackets. Put it in front of a programmer. Door desk."
In 2009, Amazon.com bought popular online shoe retailer Zappos.com in an all-stock deal worth about $1.2 billion.
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