Which online retailer went public in 1997?

The online retailer that went public in 1997 was Amazon. Amazon held its initial public offering on May 15, 1997, listing on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol AMZN.

Jeff Bezos had founded the company in 1994 as an online bookstore, initially operating from the Seattle area. The website opened for sales in July 1995, offering a much larger catalog than a conventional physical bookstore could keep on its shelves. By the time of the IPO, Amazon was still a young, loss-making business pursuing rapid expansion rather than immediate profits.

The offering priced Amazon shares at $18 and raised about $54 million. That capital helped fund warehouses, technology, staff, and expansion beyond books. Amazon added music and video in 1998, then broadened into categories such as electronics, toys, software, and home goods.

A frequent mix-up is placing Amazon’s IPO in 1998, when the company began expanding internationally and beyond books. Its public-market debut came a year earlier, in 1997, during the dot-com boom.