This Day in History: Amazon Opens for Business July 16, 1995 The brainchild of founder Jeff Bezos, the online retail behemoth began simply as an online bookseller.
Named after the Amazon River, Amazon.com was billed as "Earth's biggest bookstore." The company took off immediately, accruing $15.7 million in revenues by the end of 1996.
In 1997, Bezos hand-delivered the company's one-millionth order to a customer in Japan.
Amazon would eventually become the most valuable retailer in the world.
In 2017, Jeff Bezos was named the richest man in the world, and Amazon became a $1 trillion company in 2018.
