Amazon.com is the world's largest Internet company. It started out as an online bookstore in the middle of the 1990s and grew graduallyover the years. Today Amazon sells almost everything from CDs and DVDs to sportswear and electrical appliances. The company also produces its own tablets and e-readers and lets users upload their own photos and other files to the Amazon-based cloud.

Amazon offers its services all over the world. It operates its own websites in the UK, Germany, China, Australia, as well as many South American and Asian countries.

Amazon.com was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. It first operated out of a small garage in Washington state. Within a year Amazon offered hundreds of thousands of books. People could not only order books from an online catalogue but also write their own reviews. In 1997 Amazon.com started trading shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange. By 2000 it made over a billion dollars in sales.

As time went on Amazon.com grew gradually. It bought many of its rivals and today cooperates with other companies and lets them sell their products via the Amazon website.

In 2007 Amazon went a step further. It surprised the electronics world with a revolutionary eBook reader, the Kindle, which todaydominates the market. In 2011 a tablet computer followed, the Amazon Fire. In the following years the company started selling music downloads and videos on demand. Amazon customers can store everything they buy on their private cloud and download it anytime they want.

Today, Amazon.com serves 20 million customers every day. Its annual income is over 34 billion dollars.