Amazon is one of the most popular site in the world where you can find & buy almost everything you want or need! But how could this become possible? In 2013 Brad Stone, a senior executive editor for technology at Bloomberg News has written a book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” which describes the early years of Amazon’s existence and how it turned from an online bookstore to the current giant of e-commerce. There, I collected some amazing and interesting facts about Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos. 
The Untold Story of Amazon | Amazing and Interesting Facts
- ➢ Initially Amazon had a different name “Cadabra”, but Jeff Bezos declined it after his lawyer heard a “cadaver” corpse.
- ➢ Bezos also liked the name relentless. By the way if you go to the site relentless.com you will be redirected to the main page of Amazon.
- ➢ The logo Amazon refers A to Z world store, where the website has a list of products in alphabetical order.
- ➢ Earlier in the office of Amazon there was a bell that rings whenever someone made a purchase. A few weeks later, the bell began to ring so often that it had to be removed.
- ➢ Initially Bezos opened the company in his garage. The servers required so much power that when Bezos and his wife included a hair dryer or a vacuum cleaner in the house a short circuit occurred.
- ➢ During the first month of its work, Amazon sold books to people over 50 states of America and 45 different countries. A little-known book on lichens saved Amazon from bankruptcy.
- ➢ At the very beginning of Amazon’s existence, Jeff bezos with his wife Mackenzie and their first employee Shel Kaphan held meetings at the local Barnes & Noble store. In 1996, Bezos met with the store owners and they said they respected him but they were still going to launch a site that would rival Amazon. When that site did launch, one of the founders of Barnes & Noble Bookstore, Leonard Riggio wanted to call it “Book Predator”.
- ➢ Jeff Bezos wanted his employees to work at least 60 hours a week. Previously the company did not know what it meant to maintain a balance between work and personal life.
- ➢ In 1998, Amazon faced the lack of enough staff under Christmas, then the company got help from friends and relatives. After this, Amazon appointed new staff for handling Holiday orders.
- ➢ When ebay came to existence, Amazon launched its own auction site. That idea was failed but Bezos liked it.
- ➢ Dissatisfied customers can send a complaint to Bezos personal mail and he will forward it to the right employee with one single frightening symbol “?”.
- ➢ Even before Google Street View appeared Amazon had Block View. In 2004 Amazon launched the search engine a9.com. The team working on it also began to develop a project called Block View which would output their photos from the street in response to a search query about shops and restaurants.
- ➢ For less than $100,000, Amazon sent its photographers with cars to twenty US cities to take pictures of the restaurants they needed.
- ➢ Amazon’s Kindle is previously called as “Fiona”, and the name kindle is originated from Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”.
- ➢ There is a rumour that Jeff Bezos hired a special assistant who helps him react to news not so severely.
- ➢ In 2006, there’s a most amusing story happened with a temporary employee of the Kansas Center. The employee is leaving the beginning of the shift, but during his working hours, no one saw him. only a week later it was discovered that the man made himself a den inside a pile of empty wooden boxes. Inside, he built a bed of Amazon products, fortified the walls with pages torn from books and even stole the ordered food. When his den was finally found the employee was fired, which is not surprising.
“Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.” Bezos said.
Some More Hidden Facts About Amazon One Should Know
- ➢ Amazon came to online on July 5 1994 but until 2002 didn’t get any profit despite the multimillion-dollar sales. Even though it’s a huge company but not a very profitable business until 2009.
- ➢ Amazon distribution centers are very big and one of them in the city of Swansea, Wales (UK) has an area of 800 thousand square feet.
- ➢ Books at Amazon are 14% more expensive than in other stores and this conclusion was made by the consulting company Simon-Kucher & Partners after comparing the prices with others.
- ➢ The US courier service delivers Amazon parcels to customers only on Sundays. Approximately 1500 parcels from Amazon are delivered on Sundays only.
- ➢ Amazon’s warehouses are 700 times longer than Madison Square Garden, a sports complex in New York and can hold more water than 10000 Olympic pools. For that Amazon launches its own unlimited cloud service.
- ➢ If amazon was a country, then the number of its users would be twice the population of Canada – 135 million customers. And every day the site receives 50 thousand orders.
- ➢ If Amazon site crashes for even just a few minutes the losses are in the millions of dollars. Once the site had crashed for 49 minutes, the company has to lose almost $5.7 million. For every minute the company lost $66,400.
- ➢ Each user of amazon brings the company five times more money than the user of ebay. Each buyer on amazon makes an order on average $3.
- ➢ Amazon has more employees than Microsoft, today it has more than 566 thousand employees and their number is increasing.