Amazon.com

Amazon.com: The online store that enabled consumers to buy books at the touch of a button.

                    For hundred of years, if readers wanted a book, they went to a book store; if the title was not in stock, they had to order it and wait for notification from the bookstore that it had come in. But the advent of the Internet in the 1990s gave U.S. businessman Jeffrey P.Bezos the opportunity to make every book in existence - not just every title currently in print - available to anyone with a PC and a method of paying: the customer no longer had to leave home to shop.

                   Amazon.com (a name chosen principally because "A" is at the start of the alphabet) was founded in Washington State in 1994 and sold its first book in July of the following year. It later expanded inti other markets, including CDs, DVDs, MP3 downloads, software, video games, clothing, domestic electronic appliances, food, toys and jewelry. meanwhile it spread its operations from the United States to other countries: the firm currently also has websites and warehouses in Canada, China, Grance, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom by 2012, some 44 percent of its $12.8 billion sales were coming from outside the United States. At the time of writing, Amazon.com is the biggest retailer in the world with 69000 employees fulfilling orders from 1905 million customers a day and the business is still growing.

                With business booming, Amazon.com has been able to reduce prices below a level that smaller competitors find economical and crucially cut delivery times to the bone: for popular items, the time lag between receiving the order and making the delivery may be as little as twenty-four hours, at least in urban areas. Amazon.com has revolutionized the book world challenging publishers to fulfill orders faster than ever before and confronting traditional main street retailers with a choice between streamlining and diversifying or closing forever. In the case of music, main street sellers have already all but disappeared in many areas.