The past decade has been a boom time for Internet shopping. And for most of it, amazon.com has been at the forefront of it.
By now, most people know the story of Amazon.com. The company was founded back in 1995 by Jeff Bezos, a graduate of Princeton University who started out as a financial analyst before pursuing his entrepreneurial aspirations.
Faster than most, Bezos recognized the e-commerce potential of the Internet. He decided to start out by selling books, and literally ran Amazon.com from his garage until he received enough capital from investors to expand accordingly. The website was a hit right off the bat with Internet-savvy consumers. Amazingly, in its first month of operation, Amazon.com was averaging five-figure sales and could count customers in all fifty states as well as several foreign countries.
But Bezos didn't stop there. He had big dreams for Amazon.com, and wanted it to become the first website that online consumers go to for whatever their shopping needs. So he continued to add other products besides books to the Amazon.com lineup. These days, shoppers can buy CDs, DVDs, gourmet food, jewelry, computers, furniture, and just about everything else at Amazon.com.
Bezos took his company public in 1997, and became a billionaire soon after. The company, now in its tenth year of operation, has shown no signs of slowing down and remains one of the most popular websites on the Internet.
It's easy to understand why Amazon.com is so appealing to consumers. First of all, you can find almost any type of product in just about any selection on their site. Not only that, but shopping online makes it much more convenient for you to do your shopping from a single site than to have to track orders from several different ones.
For example, if you want to purchase a sweater, a bag of cat food, a DVD, and a bread machine, you would ordinarily have to order from several different stores. That would mean filling out four different order forms, paying for shipping four separate times, and tracking four different packages to make sure that you actually receive my orders. But with Amazon.com, you can order all four items from the same site and do all of those other things just once.
A second reason that many like Amazon.com is that their prices are very competitive compared to other online retailers. The regular prices of all merchandise on the site is discounted to begin with, and they almost always have some kind of special sale or promotion going on. I've never paid full price when buying something from Amazon.com, which is definitely a good thing.
A third reason that many like Amazon.com is that they have product reviews from consumers right on the order page. Before you spend your hard-earned money on something, you can read reviews from other regular people to see how the products worked for them. I have to admit that I've changed my mind about several purchases on the strength of the reviews I read on Amazon.com.
If you're looking for a comprehensive online retailer for your shopping needs, then there's very few places better than Amazon.com to begin your search..
