Some very interesting facts about Amazon.com

• The smile in the above logo goes from a to z
• The amazon.com website launched on July 16, 1995
• In 2016 Amazon accounted for 43% of all online revenue!
• The first purchase was by John Wainwright, who on April 3, 1995 (much before the site opened to the general public) purchased Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter.  There is building at the Amazon campus named after first customer John Wainwright.
• Amazon ships 35 items a second!
• 45% of the U.S. population is within 20 miles of an Amazon Fulfillment Center. 10 years ago it was only 5%.
• Amazon spends $14 billion per year alone on logistics and transportation.
• A warehouse worker walks on average 13 miles per day inside an Amazon warehouse
• One key to Amazon’s dominance is that it maintains about a three day lead over other e-commerce retailers in terms of shipping.
• Amazon stock lost 95% of its value between 1999 and 2001.  But since it’s IPO in 1997, the stock has returned a cumulative 49,000% gain!
• Amazon has separate retail websites for United States, United Kingdom and Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India and Mexico.
• In 2014, Amazon’s site was down for 49 minutes and the company missed sales of nearly $4.8 million
• Share of amazon customers who are prime members: 60%
• The original Kindle was nickmaned Fiona, based on a character from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a futuristic novel about an engineer who steals a rare interactive textbook to give to his daughter. Amazon has also named one of its buildings Fiona. Personally, I’ve read the Diamond Age three times and it influenced how I raised my daughters.
• In addition to being a huge internet based retailer, Amazon is also the leader in cloud computing and storage with a 63% share of cloud infrastructure services. That business is called Amazon Web Services and has has more than a 1 million active customers in 190 countries, including nearly 2,000 government agencies, 5,000 schools and over 17,500 nonprofits
• Only about 8.5% of all retail goods are currently bought online… e-commerce still has a lot of growth opportunity