Article

Top 100: 3. Amazon

July 5, 2010

What was once a humble online bookstore is now the 800-pound gorilla of the retail world. The company was a pipedream of founder Jeff Bezos at first; within three years he had taken it public. A year later it added music and video products to its already massive book inventory; toys and clothing followed a few years later. Today, it is hard to find a product that isn’t available on Amazon, either directly through the company or from one of its legion of authorized resellers and distributors.

Many of the best and most pervasive attributes of online shopping were either invented or perfected by Amazon. Customer reviews are now a must-have for most e-tailers, but at one time the concept of letting “ordinary people” put content on a corporate Web site was heretical. The company pioneered, then honed to a fine point, a recommendation system that keeps meticulous track of previous purchases, then suggests new items based on previous selections.

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