Amazon’s Invasion of The Online Sales Market

In the first quarter of 1998 number of Amazon’s customer accounts was a slightly above 2 million, it was an increase by the half in just three months, and mind-bending increase of 564 percent over the previous year, it took Amazon.com 27 months to serve its first million customers and only 6 to serve the second million. This made Amazon.com the third largest bookseller in the United States.

The company started the expansion of its influence range by acquisition of three companies, two of which were acquired for the further expansion of Amazon.com in Europe. One of the largest online booksellers in the United Kingdom – The Bookpages, gave Amazon.com access to the U.K. market, Telebook, the largest online bookseller in Germany, served as the entrance to its home market. Both companies gave Amazon not only the access to the new profit sources in two of most Europe’s most important countries, but it also gave existing Amazon more resources from all around the world. The third new purchase - Internet Movie Database was vital for its further movement into online video sales. The tremendous resources and information of the IMD served as a valuable asset in the building of the future domination of the Amazon.com

Another sensation happened in 1998 when company announced that it will also expand to the music industry. Several months before officially opening its music site, Amazon.com asked its bookstore customers and members of the music profession to help design the new web site.

At the of the second quarter of 1998 with very confident number of customer accounts which left the point of three million far behind and with sales figures for Amazon.com continued to rise, and more products and titles were added, the future looked bright for this young venture in the Internet trading. With music as a part of the company mix on one hand, and video sales on the other, Jeff seemed to have accomplished his goal of invasion of the online sales market. As Bezos told in his interview to the Fortune magazine in December 1996: “By the beginning of 21st century, there could be two or three big online bookstores. We need to be one of them”.