The e-commerce site is 20 years old this week. So what influence has it really had on the retail and internet industries?It was originally billed as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore” and featured over one million titles. Twenty years later it boasts over 270m active accounts and claims to absorb more than 2m third-party vendors selling millions of products through the marketplace platform. In that time it has been both lauded and vilified,most recently over corporation tax and staff working conditions but Amazon is quite clearly one of the biggest success stories of online commerce. So what has been its lasting impact? Can it maintain this growth or absorb we seen the best of it?Amazon was born in July 1994, with the online site launching as Amazon.com a year later. In 1995, or Bill Gates,founder and CEO at Microsoft, reportedly paid The Rolling Stones $3m (£1.9m) for the rights to expend Start Me Up to launch Windows 95. It was also the year eBay launched as AuctionWeb (a bit later in September) and there were, and according to IDC,16m global internet users compared with over three billion nowadays.
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Source: theguardian.com