Amazon was the first e-commerce business to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization, in September 2018.
Amazon crossed the threshold on September 4, 2018, about one month after Apple became the first publicly traded company to reach $1 trillion. The milestone reflected the scale of Amazon's online marketplace, logistics network, cloud-computing division, and growing advertising business.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore. It expanded into many categories and built fulfillment centers, subscription services, digital entertainment, and Amazon Web Services. AWS became especially important because its profits helped support the broader company's valuation.
“E-commerce business” describes Amazon's origin and core retail activity, even though the company is now diversified. Alibaba, eBay, and Shopify are also major online-commerce companies, but they did not claim this specific first-to-$1-trillion milestone.