Amazon (company)

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Amazon.com, Inc.
File:Amazon com logo.svg
File:Amazonscreen.png
Screenshot of Amazon.com home page
Type of businessPublic (Nasdaq: AMZN)
Type of site
e-commerce
Available inEnglish
.com, .co.uk, .ca
Chinese .cn
French .fr, .ca
German .de, .at
Japanese .co.jp
Founded1994
Headquarters
Seattle, Washington
,
USA
Key peopleJeff Bezos, Founder, President, CEO, and Chairman
Rick Dalzell, Senior VP/CIO
Tom Szkutak, Senior VP/CFO
Werner Vogels, VP/CTO
IndustryRetail
ProductsAmazon.com
A9.com
Alexa Internet
IMDb
WebStore by Amazon
RevenueIncrease US$10.71 billion (2006)
Net incomeIncrease US$190 million (2006)
Employees13,900 (2006)
URLwww.amazon.com
Launched1995

Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) is an American e-commerce company based in Seattle, Washington. It was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet and was one of the iconic stocks of the late 1990s dot-com bubble. After the bubble burst, Amazon faced skepticism about its business model, but it made its first annual profit in 2003.

Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, and launched in 1995, Amazon.com began as an online bookstore, though it soon diversified its product lines, adding VHSs, DVDs, music CDs, MP3s, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and more.

Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, France, China, and Japan. It ships globally on selected products.

History and business model

Amazon was founded in 1994, spurred by what Bezos refers to as his "regret minimization framework," i.e. his effort to fend off late-in-life regret for not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush.[1] It is common lore that Bezos wrote its business plan while he and his wife drove a 1988 Chevrolet Blazer from Fort Worth, Texas to Bellevue, Washington.[2]

The company began operating as an online bookstore under the name Cadabra.com (as in abracadabra), a name that Bezos quickly abandoned due to its sounding like "cadaver".[2] While the largest brick-and-mortar bookstores and mail-order catalogs for books might offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could offer many times more. Bezos renamed his company "Amazon" after the world's most voluminous river. The company was incorporated in 1994 in the state of Washington, began service in July 1995, and was reincorporated in 1996 in Delaware. The first book ever sold by Amazon.com was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.[3] Amazon.com had its initial public offering on May 15 1997, trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol AMZN at an IPO price of US$18.00 per share (equivalent to US$1.50 after three stock splits during the late 1990s).

Amazon's initial business plan was unusual: the company did not expect to turn a profit for four to five years. In retrospect, the strategy was effective. Amazon grew at a steady pace in the late 1990s while many other Internet companies grew at a blindingly fast pace. Amazon's "slow" growth caused a number of its stockholders to complain, saying that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough. When the Dot-com bubble burst and many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered and finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2002: a meager US$5 million, just 1¢ per share, on revenues of over US$1 billion, but it was important symbolically. The firm has since remained profitable: net income was US$35.3 million in 2003, US$588.5 million in 2004, US$359 million in 2005, and US$190 million in 2006 (including a US$662 million charge on R&D in 2006). Nevertheless, the firm's cumulative profits remain negative, since the positive performance of recent years is not yet sufficient to wipe out the losses of the past, as of 2005 the accumulated deficit stood at US$2.03 billion.

Revenue continued to grow thanks to product diversification and international presence: US$3.9 billion in 2002, US$5.3 billion in 2003, US$6.9 billion in 2004, US$8.5 billion in 2005, and US$10.7 billion in 2006. On November 21 2005, Amazon entered the S&P 500 index, replacing the venerable AT&T after it merged with SBC Communications.

Time Magazine named Bezos its 1999 Person of the Year in recognition of the company's success in popularizing online shopping.

Merchant partnerships

The Web sites of Borders (borders.com, borders.co.uk), Waldenbooks (waldenbooks.com), Virgin Megastores (virginmega.com), CDNOW (cdnow.com), and HMV (hmv.com) are powered and hosted by Amazon. Until June 30 2006, typing ToysRUs.com into one's browser would similarly bring up Amazon.com's Toys & Games tab; however, this relationship was terminated as the result of a lawsuit.[4]

Amazon.com powers and operates retail web sites for Target, the NBA, Sears Canada, Sears UK, Benefit Cosmetics, Bebe Stores, Timex Corporation, Marks & Spencer, Mothercare and Bombay Company.

For a number of these companies, specifically the UK ones like Marks & Spencer and Mothercare, Amazon provides the multi-channel solutions not just the web site. That means that it also powers the in store terminals, customer-service applications and phone-sales terminals.

It also powers, although does not host, AOL's Shop@AOL service. It achieves this via Web Services technology.

Locations

Headquarters

Amazon.com's headquarters in PacMed building (Beacon Hill, Seattle)

The company's global headquarters is located on Seattle, Washington's Beacon Hill. It has offices throughout other parts of greater Seattle.

Software development centers

The company employs software developers in modest- to large-sized centers across the globe. International locations include:

Fulfillment and warehousing

Fulfillment centers are located in the following cities, often near airports:

  • North America:
  • Europe:
Amazon.co.uk warehouse, Glenrothes
  • Asia:

Product lines

Amazon has steadily branched into retail sales of music CDs, videotapes and DVDs, software, consumer electronics, kitchen items, tools, lawn and garden items, toys & games, baby products, apparel, sporting goods, gourmet food, jewelry, watches, health and personal-care items, beauty products, musical instruments, industrial & scientific supplies, groceries and more.

The company launched Amazon.com Auctions, its own Web auctions service, in March 1999. However it failed to chip away at industry pioneer eBay's juggernaut growth. Amazon Auctions was followed by the launch of a fixed-price marketplace business called zShops in September 1999, and a failed Sotheby's/Amazon partnership called sothebys.amazon.com in November. Although zShops failed to live up to its expectations, it laid the groundwork for the hugely successful Amazon Marketplace service launched in 2001 that let customers sell used books, CDs, DVDs, and other products alongside new items. Amazon Marketplace's main rival today is eBay's Half.com service.

On May 16 2007 Amazon announced its intention to launch its own online music store.[5] The store launched in public beta September 25, 2007, selling downloads exclusively in MP3 format without digital rights management.[6]

In August 2007, Amazon announced Amazon Fresh, a grocery service offering perishable and nonperishable foods. Customers can pick up orders or have them delivered to their homes. Delivery is initially restricted to residents of Mercer Island, Washington, a wealthy suburb of Seattle.[7]

Website

A popular feature of Amazon is the ability for users to submit reviews to the web page of each product. As part of their review, users must rate the product on a rating scale from one to five stars. Such rating scales provide a basic idea of the popularity and dependability of a product. The review feature is an important and highly influential function for customers and was certainly one of the main reasons for amazon.com’s success at selling books. As with book reviews anywhere, the buyer must beware that all reviewers have bias. Under normal circumstances, reviews give the reader has at least a modest basis for evaluating whether to buy/read a given book. Because it is an open forum, the reader can benefit from the opinions of different people with different perspectives. However, the anonymity of web reviewers increases the chances of abuse in the form of self-praise, praise from friends, or malicious criticism. This situation was confirmed in 2004 when the origin of reviews was accidentally made public on an amazon site, and some authors openly confirmed their glowing reviews of their own books (see Trivia below). Amazon provides a badging option for reviewers, e.g., to indicate the “real name” of the reviewer (based on the credit card name) or to indicate that the reviewer is one of the “top” (most popular) reviewers. Because badging is optional, the risk of abuse remains. Caveat emptor. Some books have well over one thousand reviews (e.g. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged), but many books, especially new ones, have none. The US site generally has the highest quantity of reviews, but other country sites offer the perspectives of other reviewers. A review posted on one site is not necessarily visible on another site.

Search Inside the Book is a feature which makes it possible for customers to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the catalog.[8][9] The feature started out with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23 2003. There are currently about 250,000 books in the program. Amazon has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform these searches. To avoid copyright violations, Amazon.com does not return the computer-readable text of the book but rather a picture of the page containing the found excerpt, disables printing of the pages, and puts limits on the number of pages in a book a single user can access. Amazon is planning to launch Search Inside the Book internationally. Additionally, customers can purchase access to read the entire book online via the Amazon Upgrade program, although the selection of books eligible for this service is currently limited.

According to information in Amazon.com discussion forums, Amazon derives about 40% of its sales from affiliates, whom they call "Associates." An Associate is an independent seller or business that receives a commission for referring customers to the Amazon.com site. Associates do this by placing links on their websites to the Amazon homepage or to specific products. If a referral results in a sale, the Associate receives a commission from Amazon. Worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs.[10] Associates can access the Amazon catalog directly on their websites by using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) XML service. Amazon was one of the first online businesses to set up an affiliate marketing program.[11] AStore is a new affiliate product that allows Associates to embedded a subset of Amazon products within, or linked to from, another website.

According to the Internet audience measurement website Compete.com, Amazon attracts approximately 50 million U.S. consumers to its website on a monthly basis (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/amazon.com).

Acquisitions and spinoffs

  • In August 1998, Amazon bought Cambridge, Massachusetts-based PlanetAll for 800,000 shares of Amazon stock. PlanetAll operated a Web-based address book, calendar, and reminder service. In the same deal, Amazon acquired Sunnyvale-based Junglee.com, an XML-based data mining startup for 1.6 million shares of Amazon stock. The two deals together were valued at about US$280 million at the time. Most staff of both firms were absorbed by Amazon in early 1999. These employees went on to build community-focused features for the Amazon Web site, including Amazon.com Auctions, Amazon.com Marketplace, Friends & Favorites, and Purchase Circles.
  • In 2004, Amazon purchased Joyo.com, a Chinese e-commerce Web site. It also debuted A9.com, a company focused on researching, and building innovative technology. One of the technologies A9.com was working on was a search engine with a "Search Inside the Book" feature allowing users to search within the text of books as well as searching for text on the Web. Another A9 technology was its "Find It on the Block" feature allowing users to find not just the phone number, address, map, and directions for a business; but to see a picture of it, and all the businesses and shops on that same street.
  • In July 2005, Amazon purchased CreateSpace (formerly CustomFlix), a Scotts Valley, CA-based distributor of on-demand DVDs.[12] Since the acquisition, CreateSpace has expanded its on-line services to include on-demand books and CDs, as well as video downloads. On July 30, 2007, the National Archives announced that it would make thousands of historic films available for purchase through CreateSpace.[13]
  • In May 2007, Amazon acquired dpreview.com, a London-based digital photography review website created by Phil Askey as his personal hobby website and Brilliance Audio, the largest independent publisher of audiobooks in the United States.[15]
  • Amazon spinoffs include search technology company A9.com and shoe and handbag store Endless.com.

Noteworthy events

In 2002, Amazon became the exclusive retailer for the much-hyped Segway Human Transporter. Bezos was an early supporter of the Segway before its details were made public.

On June 21 2003, Amazon coordinated what was at the time one of the largest sales and distribution events in e-commerce history with the sale of over 1.3 million copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, since beaten by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with a sale of over 2 million copies preordered in 2007.

On July 16 2005, Amazon celebrated its 10th anniversary by telecasting a worldwide live concert hosted by Bill Maher and artists such as Bob Dylan and Norah Jones.

Innovations

Amazon Web Services

Main article: Amazon Web Services

Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002. The service provides programmatic access to many features leveraged behind the scenes on its own website. AWS was rapidly adopted by what now amount to tens of thousands of software developers.

Amazon MP3 Downloads

On 26th September 2007, Amazon launched a new music store (currently in beta) which sells downloadable tracks, all in the MP3 format (256 kilobits per second VBR). Music downloaded from the site is free of digital rights management (DRM). Songs are priced at 89 cents to 99 cents, and albums from $4.95 to $9.99. Participating record labels include EMI and Universal, as well as many independent labels.[16]

Amazon S3

Main article: Amazon S3

In March 2006, Amazon launched an online storage service called Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). An unlimited number of data objects, from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes in size, can be stored in S3 and distributed via HTTP or BitTorrent. The service charges monthly fees for data stored and for data transferred.

Amazon EC2

Main article: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

In August 2006, Amazon also introduced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a virtual site farm, allowing users to use the Amazon infrastructure with its high reliability to run diverse applications ranging from running simulations to web hosting.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Main article: Amazon Mechanical Turk

In November 2005, Amazon.com began testing Amazon Mechanical Turk, an application programming interface (API) allowing programs to dispatch tasks to human processors.

Amazon Flexible Payments Service

On August 2, 2007 Amazon launched a payment service specifically targeted at developers. Amazon FPS has facilities for developing many different charging models including micro-payments. The service also gives developers easy access to Amazon customers.

Amazon Connect

Amazon announced Amazon Connect in 2005. It enables authors to post remarks that appear at the bottom of the detail pages for each of their books and on the Amazon home page of those who have bought their books.

Amazon Shorts

Amazon Shorts is a program launched in 2005. The program offers exclusive short form content including short stories and non-fiction pieces from best selling authors, all available for immediate download at $0.49. As of June 2007, the program has over 1,700 pieces and is adding about 50 new pieces per week.

Discussion boards

In August 2006, Amazon launched product wikis (later folded into Amapedia) and discussion forums for certain products. There are set guidelines that follow standard message board conventions. Discussion boards were later expanded to include deals in the Gold Box[17] and to cover collections of items with the same user-provided tags.[18]

Amazon Prime

In February 2005, Amazon launched Amazon Prime in the continental United States.[19] Amazon Prime subscribers pay $79 per year and receive free 2-day shipping on all items shipped by Amazon with no minimum purchase amount. Overnight shipping for Prime members is $3.99 per item. Prime benefits extend to three family members in the same household.[20]

Amazon Prime became available in Japan in June 2007. Japanese customers may pay ¥3,900 per year and receive same-day shipping on orders shipped to the Kantō region and next-day delivery to other locations.[21]

Donations

In 2001, Amazon was one of the first online stores to begin accepting donations to the Red Cross on behalf of 9/11 victims. For several days the company dedicated its entire home page for this cause.[citation needed]

In 2004, Amazon launched its Presidential Candidates feature, whereby customers could donate from US$5 to US$200 to the campaigns of U.S. presidential hopefuls, resurrecting the Amazon Honor System for the purpose. The Honor System was originally launched in 2001 as a way for Amazon customers to "tip" their "favorite Web sites and to buy digital content on the Web," Amazon collecting 2.9% of the payment plus a flat fee of 30 cents. It has never been shut down, but had fallen into relative disuse.

At the end of 2004, with the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Amazon set up an online donation channel to the American Red Cross using the Honor System, waiving its processing fee. As of January 3 2005, over 162,000 individuals had donated over US$13.1 million in this way. The same week, Amazon created similar channels for the British, Canadian, French, German, and Japanese Red Cross organizations via its international sites. Over 7,000 Britons donated more than $350,000; 900 Canadians over $56,000; 660 French over $23,000; 2,900 Germans over $145,000; and 1,900 Japanese over $66,000.

Amazon reactivated its Red Cross donation channel when Hurricane Katrina struck at the end of August 2005. As of September 8, over 98,000 payments had been made totaling over US$10.7 million.

Amapedia

Main article: Amapedia

In January 2007 Amazon launched Amapedia, a collaborative wiki for user-generated content related to "the products you like the most." Amapedia replaced Amazon's ProductWiki product, and all ProductWiki content was copied into Amapedia at launch.

Amazon Vine

On August 15, 2007 Amazon launched a program called Amazon Vine, which allows the site's top product reviewers free access to prerelease products from vendors participating in the program.

Controversies

Trademark infringement

In 1999 the Amazon Bookstore Cooperative of Minneapolis, Minnesota sued Amazon.com for trademark infringement. The cooperative had been using the name "Amazon" since 1970, but reached an out-of-court agreement to share the name with the on-line retailer.[22]

Patent use

The company has been controversial for its alleged use of patents as a competitive hindrance. The "1-click patent"[23] is perhaps the best-known example of this. Amazon's use of the one-click patent against competitor Barnes and Noble's website led the Free Software Foundation to announce a boycott on Amazon in December 1999.[24] The boycott was discontinued in September 2002.[25] On May 12 2006, the USPTO ordered a reexamination of the "One-Click" patent, based on a request filed by Peter Calveley. Calveley cited as prior art an earlier e-commerce patent and the Digicash electronic cash system.

On February 22, 2000, the company was granted a patent covering an Internet-based customer referral system, or what is commonly called an "affiliate program". Reaction was swift and negative. Industry leaders Tim O'Reilly and Charlie Jackson spoke out strongly against this patent and O'Reilly published an open letter to Bezos protesting the 1-click patent and the affiliate-program patent, and petitioning him to "avoid any attempts to limit the further development of internet commerce". O'Reilly collected 10,000 signatures with this petition. Bezos responded with his own open letter. The protest ended with O'Reilly and Bezos visiting Washington D.C. to lobby for patent reform.

On February 25, 2003, the company was granted a patent titled "Method and system for conducting a discussion relating to an item on Internet discussion boards".[26]

Patent infringement

The company has been sued for alleged patent infringement a number of times, among them:

  • Pinpoint v. Amazon.com
  • Charles E. Hill & Associates v. Amazon.com
  • Soverain Software LLC v. Amazon.com
  • IBM v. Amazon.com
  • British Technology Group v. Amazon.com
  • Cendant Publishing v. Amazon.com

Shipping destinations

In 2006 Amazon.co.uk severely limited products that it (or its Marketplace sellers) will ship to the Republic of Ireland, though it will still ship to Northern Ireland. Irish shoppers are now limited to books, CDs, and DVDs only. This is due to WEEE regulations, which Ireland has implemented extremely strictly, while the UK has not.

During 2007, Irish orders began to be fulfilled from Ireland, reducing delivery times significantly. This is connected to Amazon ceasing to use Royal Mail as a delivery agent.

Customer service

Amazon.com does not publish its toll-free customer service number (+1-800-201-7575) on its own web site. Customers are instead asked to submit written service requests (which are answered by e-mail) or to use a click-to-call service to be connected by phone to an available service representative.[27] There are numerous Web pages that exist solely to publish the Amazon.com customer service phone numbers, one of which received in excess of 23,000 visits in December 2004 alone.[28] Despite the perceived difficulty in reaching customer service by phone, "[n]o retailer or service provider in the ACSI has higher customer satisfaction than Amazon."[29][30]

Labor relations

In November 2000, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) began an unsuccessful campaign to organize Amazon.com employees at several of their fulfillment centers. At the same time, the Communications Workers of America undertook a campaign to unionize some 400 customer-service representatives in Seattle. Neither group of employees found the external organizations' attempt significant; neither union obtained enough interest to petition the National Labor Relations Board for an election. It should be noted that the customer-service center was closed down shortly after the campaign.

Chris Benoit DVD

In late June 2007, shortly after the death of professional wrestler Chris Benoit, Amazon displayed a special note on search results pages for the term "WWE": “Tragic news from the WWE. Wrestler Chris Benoit and his wife and son have been found dead in their Georgia home, and police are investigating the situation as a possible murder-suicide.” The caption was then followed by a photo and a link to purchase the WWE Chris Benoit: Hard Knocks DVD. Amazon.com later removed the offending message after widespread complaints in the professional wrestling community.[31]

The Humane Society of the United States v. Amazon.com, Inc., et al

Amazon continues to carry two cockfighting magazines and two dog fighting videos in spite of the fact that the sale of these materials is a violation of U.S. federal law. Consequently, the Humane Society of the United States has filed a lawsuit against Amazon (http://www.hsus.org/in_the_courts/docket/amazon.html) The HSUS is actively advising supporters to write Amazon requesting the removal of the offensive materials. This writing campaign gained momentum in August of 2007 after the much publicized dog fighting case involving NFL quarterback Michael Vick. Some supporters are also calling for a boycott of Amazon until the animal fighting materials are removed from sale.

Trivia

  • Some of the words in Amazon.com URLs, usually referring to various components of the company's web site software, are nods to the Amazon River and Brazil:
    • obidos (the name of the old page-rendering engine) comes from Óbidos, the meeting place of the Amazon's tributaries;
    • várzea is Portuguese (Brazil's main language) for a forest flooded after heavy rains, as parts of the Amazon forest are;
    • gp is short for Gurupa (the page-rendering system that had completely replaced Obidos by late 2006), a region in Brazil near the mouth of the Amazon.
  • Similarly Brazil- or Amazon-themed names are used for many other Amazon.com software systems less exposed to the end users, e.g.:
  • A 2004 glitch in Amazon.ca's review system revealed that many well-established authors were anonymously giving themselves glowing reviews, with some revealed to be anonymously giving "rival" authors terrible reviews. The glitch in the system was fixed and those reviews have since been removed or made anonymous.[32][33]
  • An easter egg can be found on Amazon.com's website. An invisible link at the very bottom of the "Directory of All Stores" page leads to a February 2002 tribute to David Risher, "Amazon.com's favorite site surfer".

See also

References

  1. ^ Time Magazine 1999 Person of the Year -- Jeffrey P.Bezos
  2. ^ a b NYTimes, July 10 2005: "A Retail Revolution Turns 10"
  3. ^ Amazon.com's company timeline
  4. ^ E-Commerce Times: Toys 'R' Us wins right to end amazon partnership., March 3, 2006
  5. ^ "Amazon.com to Launch DRM-Free MP3 Music Download Store". Marketatch.com. 2007-05-16. Retrieved 2007-05-20. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  6. ^ http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1055053&highlight=
  7. ^ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/01/remember-webvan-so-does-amazon/
  8. ^ Amazon.com's online reader Search Inside reference
  9. ^ Amazon.com Search Inside reference
  10. ^ http://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/gp/associates/join/main.html
  11. ^ http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=832131
  12. ^ "Amazon buys DVD-on-demand site". Retrieved 2007-08-03.
  13. ^ "Thousands of National Archives Films to Be Made Available Through CustomFlix Labs". Retrieved 2007-08-03.
  14. ^ Wisconsin Technology Network: "Amazon acquires Madison-based Shopbop"
  15. ^ "Amazon.com Acquires Brilliance Audio". Taume News. 2007-05-27. Retrieved 2007-05-28. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  16. ^ http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070925005710&newsLang=en
  17. ^ Gold Box deal discussion forum
  18. ^ A post in the "wii" tag forum
  19. ^ http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=847395&highlight=
  20. ^ Amazon Prime help page
  21. ^ http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1030042&highlight=
  22. ^ "Amazon.com, Bookstore Settle Suit". InternetNews. 1994-11-04. Retrieved 2006-09-24. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  23. ^ US patent 5960411, Hartman; Peri (Seattle, WA), Bezos; Jeffrey P. (Seattle, WA), Kaphan; Shel (Seattle, WA), Spiegel; Joel (Seattle, WA), "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network", issued 1997-09-12 
  24. ^ "Richard Stallman -- Boycott Amazon!". Linux Today. 1999-12-22. Retrieved 2006-09-22. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  25. ^ From the FSF site: amazon philosophy.
  26. ^ US patent 6525747, Bezos; Jeffrey P., "Method and system for conducting a discussion relating to an item", issued 1999-08-02 
  27. ^ Amazon.com Click-to-Call feature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/call-me.html/?skip=true
  28. ^ "The Amazon.com Customer Service Phone Number"
  29. ^ [1]
  30. ^ [2]
  31. ^ "JBL COMMENTS ON BENOIT TRAGEDY & MORE BENOIT NOTES," on Pro Wrestling Insider published on June 28, 2007.
  32. ^ http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/02/14/glitch.reveals.ap/index.html
  33. ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=technology&res=9C07E0DC1F3AF937A25751C0A9629C8B63

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Amazon.com.

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