Timeline of Amazon.com

This is a timeline of Amazon.com, American electronic commerce and cloud computing company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington.

Overview

Time period	Key developments at Amazon
1994–1998	Amazon starts off as an online bookstore selling books, primarily competing with local booksellers and Barnes & Noble. It IPOs in 1998.
1998–2004	Amazon starts to expand its services beyond books. It also starts offering convenience services, such as Free Super Savers Shipping.
2005–2011	Amazon moves into the cloud computing area with Amazon AWS, as well as the crowdsourcing area with Amazon Mechanical Turk. By being an early player, it eventually dominates the cloud computing scene, allowing it to control much of the physical infrastructure of the Internet.[1] Amazon also offers the Amazon Kindle for people to purchase their books as eBooks, and by 2010, more people buy ebooks than physical books off of Amazon.
2011–2015	Amazon starts offering mobile streaming services like Amazon Music and Amazon Video. By 2015, its market capitalization surpasses that of Walmart.

Full timeline

Year	Month and date	Event type	Details
1994	July 5	Company	Amazon founded.[2]
1997	May 15	Company	Amazon IPOs at $18.00/share, raising $54 million.[2]
1998	April 27	Acquisitions	Amazon acquires the Internet Movie Database, a comprehensive repository for movie information on the Internet.[3]
1998	August 5	Company Direction	Amazon announces that it will move beyond books.[4]
1998	December	Competition	Jack Ma launches Alibaba in China, which would later grow to dominate the Chinese online retail market, and provide an obstacle to Amazon's attempts to expand in China.[5][6]
2002	January	Product	Amazon launches Free Super Saver Shipping, which allows customers to get free shipping for orders above $99.[2]
2002	March	Legal, Competition	Amazon settles its October 1999 patent infringement suit against Barnes & Noble (over its 1-Click checkout system, which it received a patent for in September 1999). It originally charged that Barnes&Noble.com had essentially copied Amazon's 1-Click technology.[7]
2003	October	Product	Amazon launches A9.com, a subsidiary of Amazon.com based in Palo Alto, California that develops search and advertising technology.[8]
2004	August 19	International	Amazon acquires Joyo, an online bookstore in China, for $75 million, which then becomes the 7th regional website of Amazon.com. joyo later becomes Amazon China.[9]
2005	February	Product	Amazon launches Amazon Prime, a membership offering free two-day shipping within the contiguous United States on all eligible purchases for a flat annual fee of $79.[2]
2005	November	Product	Amazon launches Amazon Mechanical Turk, an application programming interface (API) allowing any Internet user to perform "human-intelligence" tasks such as transcribing podcasts, often at very low wages.[2]
2006	August 25	Product	Amazon launches Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a virtual site farm allowing users to use the Amazon infrastructure to run applications ranging from running simulations to web hosting.[10]
2006	September 19	Product	Amazon launches Fulfillment by Amazon, giving small businesses to use Amazon.com's own order fulfillment and customer service infrastructure - and customers of Amazon.com shipping offers when buying from 3rd-party sellers.[11]
2006		Legal	Amazon agrees to settle a legal dispute with Toys R Us (over a partnership that gave Toys R Us exclusive rights to supply some toy products on Amazon's website) and pays $51 million.[12]
2006	March	Product	Amazon launches Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which allows other websites/developers to store computer files on Amazon's servers.[2]
2007	August	Product	CreateSpace announces launch of Books on Demand service, which makes it easy for authors who want to self-publish their books to distribute them on Amazon.com.[13]
2007	August	Product	Amazon launches AmazonFresh, a grocery service offering perishable and nonperishable foods.[14]
2007	September 25	Products	Amazon launches Amazon Music, an online music store and music locker.[15]
2007	November 19	Products	Amazon launches the Amazon Kindle.[2]
2009	July 22	Acquisitions, Competition	Amazon acquires Zappos for $850 million.[16]
2009	October 20	Competition	Barnes & Noble announces the Nook, an eReader.[17]
2010	January	Competition	Apple introduces its own virtual bookstore, called iBooks, and then partners with five major book publishers.[18] It later convinces them to raise the price of ebooks (using the agency pricing model that gives publishers full control over ebook prices).
2010	February 1	Competition	Microsoft launches Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform that will compete with Amazon AWS over cloud services.
2010	July	Product	Amazon announced that e-book sales for its Kindle reader outnumbered sales of hardcover books for the first time ever.[19]
2011	January	Acquisitions, International	Amazon acquires Lovefilm, a DVD rental service known as the Netflix of Europe.[20]
2011	February 16	Competition	Borders Group, outcompeted by Amazon, applies for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.[21]
2011	February 22	Product	Amazon rebrands its Amazon Video service as Amazon Instant Video and adds access to 5,000 movies and TV shows for Amazon Prime members.[22][23]
2011	March 22	Product	Amazon launches the Amazon Appstore for Android devices and the service was made available in over 200 countries.[24]
2011	July 1	Legal	California starts collecting sales taxes on Amazon.com purchases.[25]
2011	September	Product	Amazon launches Amazon Locker, a delivery locker system that allows users to get items delivered at specially-designed lockers.[26]
2011	September 28	Product	Amazon announces the Kindle Fire, a tablet computer that takes aim at Apple's iPad with a smaller device that sells at $199, compared with the $499 value of Apple's cheapest iPad.[27]
2012	April	Legal	The Department of Justice files suit against Apple Inc and five major publishing houses (the "Big Five"), alleging that they colluded in 2010 to raise the price of ebooks (using the agency pricing model that gives publishers full control over ebook prices).[28] Amazon had originally set the price of ebooks at $9.99 (using the wholescale pricing model giving Amazon full control over ebook prices).
2012	March 19	Acquisitions	Amazon acquires Kiva Systems for $775 million, a robotics company that creates robots that can move items around warehouses.[29]
2012	April	Legal	Amazon agrees to allow collection of sales taxes in both Nevada and Texas (starting on July 1), and agrees to create 2,500 jobs and invest $200 million in new distribution centers in Texas.[30]
2012	September 6	Products	Amazon announces the Kindle Fire HD series of touchscreen tablet computers.[31]
2013	March	Acquisitions	Amazon acquires social reading and book-review site GoodReads.[32]
2013	June	International	Amazon launches in India.[33][34]
2014	July 25	Products	Amazon launches the Amazon Fire.[35]
2014	August 25	Acquisitions	Amazon announced its intent to acquire the video game streaming website Twitch for $970 million.[36]
2014	October	Legal	Amazon reaches agreement with Simon & Schuster, allowing the publisher to adopt the agency pricing model and set prices on its books sold on Amazon.[37]
2014	November 6 (announcement), actual rollout occurs through 2015	Products	Amazon unveils Amazon Echo, a wireless speaker and voice command device that can take commands and queries, and be used to add items to the Amazon.com shopping cart, among other things.[38][39] The Alexa Voice Service that is built into Amazon Echo can also be added to other Amazon devices.[40]
2014	November	Legal	Amazon resolves dispute with Hachette, allowing Hachette to adopt the agency-pricing model and set prices on Hachette books sold on Amazon.[41]
2015	July	Competition, International	Alibaba announces that it will invest $1 billion into its Aliyun cloud computing arm, some of which would go into new Aliyun international data centers. This would allow Aliyun to compete with Amazon Web Services outside of China.[42]
2015	August 26	Products	Amazon launches Amazon Underground, an Android app through which users can get gaming and other apps for free that they would otherwise have to pay for, and also get in-app purchases for free. App creator participation is voluntary. App creators are paid $0.002 for every minute a user spends in the app.[43][44][45]
2015	November 2	Products	Amazon opened its first physical retail store, a bookstore in the University Village shopping center in Seattle. The store, known as Amazon Books, has prices matched to those found on the Amazon website and integrate online reviews into the store's shelves.[46]
2015	December 14		Amazon begins moving into their new headquarters campus in the Denny Triangle neighborhood of Seattle, beginning with the 38-story Amazon Tower I (nicknamed "Doppler" after the codename for Amazon Echo).[47] The three towers are scheduled to be completed by 2020.

References

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