Headquarters

Headquarters
Amazon.com's headquarters in the PacMed building in Beacon Hill, Seattle.

The company's global headquarters are located on Seattle's Beacon Hill. It has offices throughout other parts of greater Seattle, including Union Station and The Columbia Center.

Amazon has announced plans to move its headquarters to the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle beginning in mid-2010, with full occupancy by 2011. This move will consolidate all Seattle employees onto the new 11-building campus.[14]
[edit] Software development centers

The company employs software developers in medium- to large-sized centers across the globe. While much of Amazon's software development is in Seattle, other locations include:

* Slough (United Kingdom)
* Edinburgh (United Kingdom)
* Dublin (Ireland)
* Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad (India)
* Cape Town (South Africa)
* Iaşi (Romania)
* Shibuya, Tōkyō (Japan)
* Beijing (China)
* Tempe, Arizona (United States)

[edit] Fulfillment and warehousing

Fulfillment centers are located in the following cities, often near airports. Amazon offers warehousing and order-fulfillment for third-party sellers including large companies such as Target Corporation:[15]

* North America:

* Arizona, USA: Phoenix, Goodyear
* Delaware, USA: New Castle
* Indiana, USA: Whitestown and Plainfield
* Kansas, USA: Coffeyville
* Kentucky, USA: Campbellsville, Hebron (near CVG), Lexington, and Louisville
* Nevada, USA: Fernley and North Las Vegas
* New Hampshire, USA: Nashua
* Pennsylvania, USA: Carlisle, Chambersburg, Hazleton, Allentown, and Lewisberry
* Texas, USA: Dallas/Fort Worth
* Virginia, USA: Sterling
* Ontario, Canada: Mississauga (a Canada Post facility)

In March 2009, Amazon announced plans to close three U.S. distribution centers: Red Rock, Nevada; Chambersburg, Pennsylvania; and Munster, Indiana.[16]

* Europe:

Amazon.co.uk warehouse, Glenrothes.

* Bedfordshire, England: Marston Gate, near Brogborough
* Inverclyde, Scotland: Gourock
* Fife, Scotland: Glenrothes
* Swansea, Wales: Crymlyn Burrows[17][18] near Jersey Marine[19]
* Loiret, France: Orléans-Boigny (2000)
* Loiret, France: Orléans-Saran (2007)
* Hessen, Germany: Bad Hersfeld
* Saxony, Germany: Leipzig

* Asia:

* Ichikawa, Chiba, Japan
* Yachiyo, Chiba, Japan
* Sakai, Osaka, Japan
* Guangzhou, China
* Suzhou, China
* Beijing, China
* [[Timothy B schell, Main U.S

[edit] 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, clothing, 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.com 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.

Amazon no longer mentions either Auctions or zShops on its main pages and the help page for sellers now only mentions the Marketplace.[20] Old links to zShops now simply redirect to the Amazon home page,[21] while old links to Auctions take users to a transactions history page.[22] New product listings are no longer possible for either service.

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. Today, Amazon Marketplace's main rival is eBay's Half.com service.

Beginning August 2005,[23] Amazon began selling products under its own private label, "Pinzon"; the initial trademark applications suggested the company intended to focus on textiles, kitchen utensils, and other household goods.[23] In March 2007, the company applied to expand the trademark to cover a larger and more diverse list of goods, and to register a new design consisting of the "word PINZON in stylized letters with a notched letter O whose space appears at the "one o'clock" position.".[24] The list of products registered for coverage by the trademark grew to include items such as paints, carpets, wallpaper, hair accessories, clothing, footwear, headgear, cleaning products, and jewelry.[24] On September 2008, Amazon filed to have the name registered. While the USPTO has finished its review of the application, Amazon has yet to receive an official registration for the name.

On May 16, 2007 Amazon announced its intention to launch Amazon MP3, its own online music store.[25] The store launched in the US in public beta September 25, 2007, selling downloads exclusively in MP3 format without digital rights management.[26] This is especially notable as it was the first online offering of DRM-free music from all four major record companies.[27][28][29][30]

In August 2007, Amazon announced AmazonFresh,[31] a grocery service offering perishable and nonperishable foods. Customers can have orders delivered to their homes at dawn or during a specified daytime window. Delivery was initially restricted to residents of Mercer Island, Washington, and was later expanded to several ZIP codes in Seattle proper.[32] AmazonFresh also operated pick-up locations in the suburbs of Bellevue and Kirkland from summer 2007 through early 2008.

In 2008 Amazon expanded into film production and is currently funding the film The Stolen Child with 20th Century Fox.[33]
[edit] Website

The domain amazon.com attracted at least 615 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey. This was twice the numbers of walmart.com.[34]

According to the Internet audience measurement website Compete.com, Amazon attracts approximately 50 million U.S. consumers to its website on a monthly basis.[35]
[edit] Reviews

Amazon allows 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. In 2004 a software error accidentally showed the names behind reviews that were submitted anonymously, and some authors were shown to have written glowing reviews of their own books.[citation needed] Amazon created a feature in recent years that allowed users to comment on reviews. Amazon provides an optional badging option for reviewers which indicate the real name of the reviewer (based on confirmation of a credit card account) or which indicate that the reviewer is one of the top reviewers by popularity. The U.S. site generally has the most reviews.[citation needed] A review posted on one site is not necessarily visible on another site.

Amazon.com's customer reviews are monitored for all negative or indecent comments that are directed at anything, or anyone, but the product itself. In regards to the reviews lacking relative restrictions, Robert Spector, who is the author of the book Amazon.com, describes how "when publishers and authors asked Bezos why Amazon.com would publish negative reviews, he defended the practice by claiming that Amazon.com was ‘taking a different approach...we want to make every book available – the good, the bad, and the ugly...to let truth loose’" (Spector 132).

Reviews for different media of the same product are grouped together (for example, the review page for a particular film, whether on VHS, Blu-Ray, or DVD, will feature reviews from all three media formats). Currently, there is no way to look at reviews only for one version of a product.
[edit] Content search

"Search Inside the Book" is a feature which allows customers to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the catalog.[36][37] The feature started with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003.[38] 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. Instead, it returns a picture of the matching page, disables printing, and puts limits on the number of pages in a book a single user can access. One author observed that his entire book could be read online by searching a few words.[39] Additionally, customers can purchase online access to the some books via the "Amazon Upgrade" program, although the selection is currently quite limited.
[edit] Third-party sellers

According to information in Amazon.com discussion forums,[citation needed] Amazon derives about 40 percent of its sales from affiliates whom they call Associates and third-party sellers who list and sell products on the Amazon websites. Associates receive a commission for referring customers to Amazon 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.[40] Associates can access the Amazon catalog directly on their websites by using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) XML service. A new affiliate product, aStore, allows Associates to embed a subset of Amazon products within, or linked to from, another website.

Amazon reported over 1.3 million sellers sold products through Amazon's World Wide Web sites in 2007. Selling on Amazon has become more popular as Amazon expanded into a variety of categories beyond media and built a variety of features to support volume selling. Unlike eBay, Amazon sellers do not have to maintain separate payment accounts; all payments and payment security are handled by Amazon itself.