Amazon was the first online retailer to reach a US$1 trillion market capitalization.
Amazon crossed US$1 trillion during trading on September 4, 2018, about a month after Apple reached the same valuation. The company’s growth came from online retail, third-party sellers, subscription services, and its expanding cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services.
Amazon began as an online bookstore founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. It expanded into a broad marketplace selling products across many categories, while AWS became a major technology business serving companies, governments, and developers.
The milestone is about Amazon’s public market value, not the value of goods sold through its website. Walmart remained one of the world’s largest retailers by sales, while Alibaba was another giant in online commerce. Those measures—sales, profit, and market capitalization—answer different questions.