The new strategy would result in years of tension between various divisions, between Amazon and its suppliers, and between industry trade groups and the company. Bezos didn’t care about any of that, as long as it offered more choices to customers and, in the process, gave Amazon a greater selection of products. With a single brilliant and nonintuit

off. Prime, the two-day shipping service, was an engine spinning the company’s flywheel ever faster. Amazon customers who joined Prime doubled, on average, their spending on the site, according to a person familiar with the company’s internal finances at the time. A Prime member was like a shopper who walked into a Costco warehouse for a case of be

Bezos told his parents there was a 70 percent chance they could lose it all. “I want you to know what the risks are, because I still want to come home for Thanksgiving if this doesn’t work,” he said.

Schultz told the pair that Amazon had a big problem and that Starbucks could solve it. “You have no physical presence,” the lanky Starbucks founder said as he brewed coffee for his guests. “That is going to hold you back.” Bezos disagreed. He looked right at Schultz and told him, “We are going to take this thing to the moon.”

The money-losing Amazon Mom program was obviously introduced to help dead-end Diapers.com and force a sale, and if anyone at the time had doubts about that, those doubts were quickly dispelled by Amazon’s subsequent actions. A month after it announced the acquisition of Quidsi, Amazon closed the program to new members. But by then the Federal Trade

As usual, Bezos battled his marketing executives. They argued that Amazon had to be on the airwaves to reach new customers. As Amazon’s losses mounted, Bezos’s opposition hardened. He had the marketing department organize tests, running commercials in only the Minneapolis and Portland media markets and measuring whether they generated an uptick in

A decade later and finally preparing to retire, Sinegal remembers that conversation well. “I think Jeff looked at it and thought that was something that would apply to his business as well,” he says. Sinegal doesn’t regret educating an entrepreneur who would evolve into a ferocious competitor. “I’ve always had the opinion that we have shamelessly s

At the end of the day, Bezos, Wilke, and their colleagues reached a conclusion: the equipment and software from third-party vendors simply wasn’t designed for the task at hand. To escape from batches and move toward a continuous and predictable flow of orders through the facility, Amazon would have to rewrite all the software code. Instead of exiti

Only then did eBay finally commit to allowing fixed-price sales to share space alongside auctions on the site and in search results on eBay.com.