Amazon, one of the world's highest-valued companies by market capitalization, began in 1994 as an online store selling books.
Jeff Bezos founded the company in Bellevue, Washington, in 1994, initially under the name Cadabra. It opened as an online bookstore in July 1995 and soon expanded beyond books into music, video, electronics, and many other categories.
Books were a practical starting point because a single physical store could not stock anything close to the millions of titles available through distributors. The internet allowed Amazon to present a much larger catalogue than a traditional bookshop.
Amazon's modern business includes online retail, logistics, digital entertainment, devices, advertising, and Amazon Web Services. AWS became especially important because cloud computing gives the company a major business beyond consumer shopping.