Facts You Should Know About E-Commerce Giant Amazon

Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994 out of his home garage in Bellevue, Wash., and has turned it into an online retail giant. Amazon.com was originally named after the world's second largest river in South America. Initially, Jeff Bezos wanted to name the company 'Cadabra'. Since its beginnings as an online book seller, Amazon has diversified into a sales portal that now accounts for a third of all U.S. e-commerce sales. In August 2013, when the website went down for 40 minutes, Amazon lost $4.8 million. The volume of shipments is so great out of Amazon's fulfillment center that robots are used to assist workers to retrieve products that are going to be shipped.