Amazon.com
Leading online retailer
of books, CDs, DVDs and electronics.
Headquarters:
1200 12th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98144
Employees: 17,000
CEO: Jeff Bezos
Stock Symbol: AMZN
Website:
http://www.amazon.com
Career
Site
Amazon.com is the Internet's leading retailer.
Best known for selling books online, you can find much more for
sale at Amazon from electronics to jewelry, kitchen appliances,
groceries, clothing and software.
Amazon's massive website is praised for
its ease-of-use as well offering customer reviews and ratings
of products sold. Strong customer service and timely product
delivery has been a key to the company's success.
Amazon pioneered the use of affiliate links,
where other websites would promote Amazon products in exchange
for a commission on sales, typically 5%. The company operates
online stores for Target and Office Depot.
In addition to the U.S., Amazon also operates
sites for Canada, United Kingdom, China, Japan, France and Germany.
The company also owns IMDB ( Internet Movie Database) and Alexa,
which provides traffic information for websites. Another subsidiary,
A9.com, is based in Silicon Valley and is developing search technology
and visual Yellow Pages.
The company introduced the Kindle in 2007, a portable electronic book reader that lets users download books, newspapers and magazines wirelessly onto the device. The Kindle has a 6-inch LCD screen and sells for $359. Amazon has had trouble keeping up with demand for the Kindle. There are over 230,000 e-book titles available for downloading to Kindle.
Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.
The company announced the 2008 holiday season finished as its best ever, with over 6.3 million items ordered worldwide on the peak day, Dec. 15, which is a record-breaking 72.9 items per second. This was Amazon's 14th holiday season and like many retailers, the Christmas season accounts for a big portion of sales.
Amazon said net sales increased 29% to $19.17 billion in 2008 and net income was $645 million. International sales generated $8.9 billion in 2008.
History
The company launched its online site in
July 1995 and offered Earth's Biggest Selection of books. It
would quickly expand into a variety of categories and also offered
online auctions of goods. The company partnered with Toys R'Us
to sell toys online and went public in 1997.
CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was named Man
of the Year by Time magazine in 1999 as a visionary who symbolized
the increasing growth of Internet retailing.
The company acquired DPReview.com in 2007,
a website with in-depth reviews of digital cameras.
Benefits
Amazon headquarters are in Seattle and
it operates distribution centers in Nevada, Kansas, West Virginia,
Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
Health Care:
- A choice of three medical plans designed to meet your individual
needs (several in-network and out-of-network options), with domestic
partner coverage
- Dental plan
- Vision plan
- Company-paid basic life and accident coverage as well as optional
coverage at a low cost
- Company-paid short- and long-term disability plan
- Employee assistance program including dependent-care referral
services and financial/legal services
- Health-care and dependent-care flexible spending accounts
Time Off:
- Salaried employees earn two weeks of vacation time in the first
year, three weeks of vacation in the second
- Hourly employees earn 40 hours of vacation time in the first
year, 80 hours in the second
- Five personal days every year in addition to six holidays
Savings Plans:
- Every full-time Amazon.com employee receives Amazon.com Restricted
Stock Units
- 401(k) savings plan with a company match
- Several employee discount programs
Updated January 29, 2009
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