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Amazon.com is an American electronic commerce company based in Seattle, Washington. It was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet (Wikipedia, 2004). As a founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos is a pioneer in e-commerce (Saunders, 2001, pp. 1-26). In 1994, the early year of the mainstream internet, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com. At the moment, he had a far-sight into the growing of a business on the Web, including the pitfalls on the trail to profitability (Saunders, 2001, pp. 1-26). Bezos saw the potential of the internet; while the largest brick-and mortar bookstore might sell upwards of 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could sell many times more (Wikipedia, 2004). So, Bezos started his aspiration, he launched Amazon.com Inc. on Web in June 1995 and it began service in the following month. The company was originally incorporated in 1994 in the state of Washington and was reincorporated in 1996 in Delaware (Wikipedia, 2004). Amazon.com had its initial public offering (In financial market terminology, IPO is the initial sale of the common shares of a corporation to the public) on May 15, 1997, trading on the NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, the world’s first electronic stock market) stock exchange under the symbol AMZN (Wikipedia, 2004).

When Amazon.com first entered the market, it had no big rivals and there were no dominant traditional players. The number one supplier, Barnes & Noble, had only about one-tenth of market share and no online presence (Saunders, 2001, pp. 1-26). While there was now a bevy of booksellers on the net, including book behemoth, Barnes & Noble and the second largest bookseller, Borders, Amazon.com still had the advantage of being there first. But as it had moved into new product lines like CDs, video games, pet supplies, computer software, electronics, and provides services like auctions and greeting cards, it had found itself up agaisnt dominant...