by Lichfield1979

Created on: November 17, 2008

Amazon.com launched in 1995 as an online book retailer and grew steadily through the end of the decade surviving the dot-com bubble and establishing itself as one of the best-known brands on the internet. It did not operate at a profit until winter 2001 although founder Jeff Bezos was named Time Magazine's person of the year for 1999. Today its revenue still dwarves its profit and the company counters this through continued expansion and diversification. Amazon is no longer merely a bookseller and has an extensive range of software, films, music and electrical goods amongst many other products. The website attracts twice as many hits as Walmart, with perhaps fifty million Americans searching it each month. It also owns the Internet Movie Database and has recently taken over AbeBooks.

Amazon.co.uk is one of six additional main international websites the Seattle based company now operates, with the others based in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and China. Amazon's presence in Britain is now well established, with four major fulfilment centres in Bedfordshire, Inverclyde, Fife, and Neath Port Talbot. Many new features of the larger parent site tend not to roll out immediately, and so I often use both when searching, although an increasingly larger proportion of Amazon's features and database of products are available to UK users, and site redesigns tend to catch up every few months. One feature that doesn't seem to have crossed the Atlantic at all so far is the magazine subscription service.

The site allows customers to leave product ratings and feedback, and some of this can be very useful in getting a quick impression of the reputation of something you are unfamiliar with, but happen to have stumbled on. In a bookshop, you'd have to trust only the blurb written by the marketing men, and your own snap judgement. Additional information is especially welcome when comparing two similar items, although I suppose you could get too much of a good thing and be bamboozled out of making any purchase at all, but no more so than wandering down a supermarket aisle and being confronted by eighty-six different brands of hair conditioner.

The site is also able to show what products other customers who bought a particular item were interested in too. Its efforts at making personal recommendations based on your browsing history are somewhat eccentric in my opinion, but Amazon certainly knows how to group together interesting clumps of books on a particular topic that might compliment

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