What was Amazon’s original business when Jeff Bezos founded it in 1994?

Amazon’s original business when Jeff Bezos founded it in 1994 was an online bookstore.

Bezos launched the company as an internet bookseller because books offered an unusually large catalog and were relatively easy to describe and ship. The business began under the name Cadabra, but Bezos soon changed it to Amazon, referring to the vast Amazon River and suggesting scale.

Amazon opened its website to customers in 1995. It later expanded from books into music, electronics, household goods, groceries, digital media, and many other categories. Its marketplace also allowed outside sellers to offer products through Amazon’s platform.

A common misconception is that Amazon began as a general online department store. It did not: books were the initial focus. The company’s later cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services, became another major pillar of its business decades after the bookstore launch.