Amazon.com

Amazon.com is a Online shopping portal from the earth's biggest selection of books, magazines, music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories, shoes

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and launched it online in 1995. It started as an on-line bookstore but soon diversified to product lines.



Amazon allows users to submit reviews to the web page of each product. As part of their review, users must rate the product on a rating scale from one to five stars. In 2004 a software error accidentally showed the names behind reviews that were submitted anonymously, and some authors were shown to have written glowing reviews of their own books. Amazon created a feature in recent years that allowed users to comment on reviews. Amazon provides an optional badging option for reviewers, e.g., to indicate the real name of the reviewer (based on confirmation of a credit card account) or to indicate that the reviewer is one of the top reviewers by popularity. The U.S. site generally has the most reviews. A review posted on one site is not necessarily visible on another site.

Amazon derives about 40 percent of its sales from affiliates whom they call Associates, and third party sellers who list and sell products on the Amazon websites. Associates receive a commission for referring customers to Amazon by placing links on their websites to the Amazon homepage or to specific products. If a referral results in a sale, the Associate receives a commission from Amazon. Worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs.^[35] Associates can access the Amazon catalog directly on their websites by using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) XML service. A new affiliate product, aStore, allows Associates to embed a subset of Amazon products within, or linked to from, another website.

Amazon reported over 1.3 million sellers sold products through Amazon's World Wide Web sites in 2007. Selling on Amazon has become more popular as Amazon expanded into a variety of categories beyond media and built a variety of features to support volume selling. Unlike eBay, Amazon sellers do not have to maintain separate payment accounts; all payments and payment security are handled by Amazon itself.

According to the Internet audience measurement website Compete.com, Amazon attracts approximately 50 million U.S. consumers to its website on a monthly basis

Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com