How was the beginning of Amazon in 1994 when Bezos began selling online

The company founded by Jeff Bezos went from offering only books to being a company that offers all kinds of articles online. (REUTERS/Carlos Jasso)

Before becoming the multinational company known throughout the world and providing its parcel delivery and product purchase services on its website, Amazon started in 1994 as a company in charge of selling only books on-line. His first website in nineteen ninety five, it even advertised itself as “the world’s largest bookstore.”

Because in those early years the company was not only taking off, but the Web design it was extremely basic and you could only publish texts, some images and generate links, the website of Amazon was simple and offered barely a million titles distributed in 20 categories different. To find offers, users had to search for the text that described it because they were not highlighted either.

Amazon's first website in 1995. (Web Design Museum)
Amazon’s first website in 1995. (Web Design Museum)

Unlike its current version, which allows notifications to be sent to cell phones every time a discount is generated that could be of interest to the buyer, in the beginning this service was done by email. “Please come often” was the phrase he used Amazon so that users constantly return to the Web page looking for lower prices for books.

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It was not until 1999 that Amazon would launch a new version of its website in which for the first time an idea of ​​what would eventually be its current logo could be seen instead of the “A” shaped image in its previous edition. In this case, the design is much closer to modernity with more space for images, but with a great predominance of text as a way of communicating.

Amazon website in 1999. (Web Design Museum)
Amazon website in 1999. (Web Design Museum)

It was in this year that Amazon began to diversify the products it offered in its online store because in addition to books, you could find electronic devices or accessories for computers, video games, toys, sale of movies in format vhs and a section dedicated to item auctions for clients interested in obtaining better prices.

The space and the different pages of the site were organized in different eyelashes and a search engine was also included in which the specific products that were being sought at that moment could be found.

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For 2006the cell phones they were the top selling item, so Amazon ranked them at the top of their list. Web pagefollowed by books, deals on artifacts electronic and for the first time, the images of the products were given greater importance than the text that accompanied them.

Amazon website in 2006. (Web Design Museum)
Amazon website in 2006. (Web Design Museum)

This version of the website removed the tabs that were present in past versions and started to order the products within categories to make it easier to present them to site visitors.

In 2016 Amazon renewed itself again and you already offer a much more stylized version of its Web page which resembles the current one not only for the colors, but also for the management of the items at the bottom of the screen, although in this year the number of products that could be seen in the first instance was very little.

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By this time, tabs were already used as ways to divide the space of the entire web page instead of being a tool to distribute the content of the pages. products. In addition, this version gave the search engine a higher priority since it placed it at the top instead of in a corner of the screen.

Amazon website in 2016. (Web Design Museum)
Amazon website in 2016. (Web Design Museum)

Currently, Amazon has expanded the number of products it offers and is a company with a value higher than the 1.380 million of dollars. Jeff Bezosfor his part, is one of the richest men in the world with a wealth greater than the 157.300 million of dollars.

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How was the beginning of Amazon in 1994 when Bezos began selling online