Amazon's Prime Day is so popular it will actually last two days this year, in a sales extravaganza that will take place on 15 and 16 July. Launched in 2015, it's a time when the online retail behemoth expects its sales to go through the roof as shoppers scramble for bargains. Yet Amazon couldn't have become the global phenomenon it is today without a few quirks along the way, from holding meetings in bookstores, to allowing dogs at work and even paying employees to quit. Here are the 39 facts you probably didn't know about Amazon.

Amazon started life in the garage of founder Jeff Bezos’ home in Washington State, after the 30-year old entrepreneur quit his Wall Street job and moved home, wishing to start a internet company. With a loan from his parents, followed by $8 million in funding from investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the site was launched on 16 July 1995.

Amazon was originally named Cadabra, as in the magic trick incantation ‘Abracadabra’. Perhaps Bezos was trying to highlight his plans to provide a spell-binding online service, but several people misheard it as 'cadaver', so unsurprisingly he decided to rebrand...

Other proposed names included MakeItSo.com (after Captain Picard's frequent command in Star Trek), Awake.com, Browse.com, Bookmall.com and Relentless.com. In fact, if you type relentless.com into a web browser today it will redirect you to Amazon, as the domain name is still owned by Bezos.

In the end Bezos settled on Amazon.com to suggest scale (Amazon.com launched with the tagline 'Earth's biggest book store') and because website listings at the time were alphabetical, meaning that Amazon would appear at the top.

In the early days Bezos and his team needed desks. But the thrifty CEO realised that doors were cheaper than buying desks, so he decided to buy doors and just put legs on them (pictured). While these door desks were a little wobbly, with employee number five Nico Lovejoy admitting that "you would never want to hire Jeff Bezos as a carpenter", their legacy lives on today with thousands of Amazon employees using a modern version of the door desk today. The company also hands out a 'Door Desk Award' to employees who implement thrifty ideas.

 While today you can buy anything from a foot spa to DIY tools, or even stream original Amazon Prime TV shows, in the beginning the website only sold books. But because of a lack of space, Amazon had no inventory. So, when an order came in, they would find the book online, ship it to the Amazon office and then repackage it before sending on to the customer. 

The first book Amazon.com ever sold was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, ordered by a computed scientist named John Wainwright.

Many of Amazon’s book distributors required them to order 10 books at a time. But in the early days they couldn’t afford to so, according to Brad Stone in his book The Everything Store (pictured), every time they needed to fill a customer’s order they would order the one book they needed, and nine copies of an obscure book on lichens which was always out of stock.  

Three days after launch, Bezos got an email from Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo, asking if they’d like to be featured on Yahoo's What's Cool page. Bezos said yes, Yahoo put the site on the list, and orders skyrocketed.

Today Amazon is one of the most successful companies in the world. But at launch there were a few teething problems. In fact, the site wasn't actually finished which resulted in a huge programming error that allowed sneaky customers to trick Amazon into sending them money. By ordering a negative quantity of books Amazon would credit the money to their bank card.  

The office had a bell installed that would ring every time someone made a purchase. Within a few weeks of the site going live, sales were so frequent that they had to turn it off.

In the early stages of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, his wife MacKenzie and Amazon’s first-ever employee Shel Kaphan held their meetings inside their local Barnes & Noble bookstore. However, as Amazon grew so did the competition between the bookstores...

In the company’s first year, Bezos cheekily hired mobile billboards to drive by Barnes & Noble stores displaying the question 'Can't find that book you wanted?' along with Amazon's website address.

In 1997, Barnes & Noble sued Amazon, alleging that 'Earth’s Largest Bookstore' was a false claim. They eventually settled out of court with Amazon continuing to use the slogan.

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In the early days of Amazon, Bezos got employees pick out the 20 strangest titles sold every week and awarded a prize for the weirdest. Some of the reported winners included Training Goldfish Using Dolphin Training Techniques and How To Start Your Own Country. 

Despite big sales and a healthy customer base it took almost seven years for Amazon to start making any real money. It was January 2002 before the company reported its first profitable quarter, making a modest $5 million.

Amazon employees, including CEO Bezos, spend two days every two years taking calls at the customer service desk, in order to better understand the importance of good customer service.

Proving just how seriously he takes customer service, Bezos had Amazon’s packaging redesigned after an elderly customer complained. She said she loved ordering books from the site but had to wait for her nephew to come over and tear into the difficult-to-open packaging before she could read them.

Amazon might be kind to its customers but the same isn't always true for employees. Many previous employees have spoken out about the dog-eat-dog working culture at Amazon, where employees are expected to put in up to 80 hours a week and are actively encouraged to rip into each other's ideas. In 2015, The New York Times ran a scathing expose on the subject, and more recently there has been a report in The Guardian about factory workers being forced to work through workplace injuries.

According to a report by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, Amazon users spent on average $600 (£479) on goods from the site in 2018, while Prime members spent more than double that with an average spend of $1,400 (£1,117).

In 1998 the company was dramatically understaffed for the Christmas holiday season rush. It’s reported that every employee had to take a graveyard shift in the fulfilment centers to meet demand, with many bringing their friends and family in to help too.

To ensure that doesn’t happen again, Amazon now hires a record number of staff over the holiday season. In 2015 it created 100,000 seasonal positions across its US network of fulfilment and sorting centers and over 40,000 across its European Fulfillment Network. Since then, a similar number of seasonal positions have opened up each year.

The festive period can be incredibly stressful for Amazon’s logistics team. In the early 2000s, Jeff Wilke (pictured), Amazon's operations manager, would let any person or team who accomplished a significant goal yell into the phone at him at the top of their lungs to de-stress. He said some of the screams blew out his speakers.

In 2012, Amazon’s site went down for 45 minutes due to unknown causes. The company estimates it lost nearly $5.7 million (£4.5m) in sales as a result.

Amazon counts the CIA as one of its customers, after it secured a $600 million (£478.7m) deal with the agency in 2013 for cloud computing storage, which is part of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon’s fulfilment center in Phoenix, Arizona, is made up of 1.25 million square feet, which is the equivalent of 28 football fields. You can take an hour-long tour around it if you like.

A building at Amazon's Seattle site is called Rufus, named after a Welsh corgi (like the one pictured) who was the pet of an employee. The dog liked to attend meetings and became something of a company mascot. There was also a superstition that Rufus had to tap his paw on the keyboard to launch new features on the website.

Not content with merely having a dog for a mascot, in Amazon's Seattle offices the company has taken things a step further. After Rufus warmed the hearts of so many employees, Amazon begun to allow workers to take their own dogs to work, and now there are 7,000 pups in the headquarters on any given day. There's even a 'doggie deck' on the 17th floor.

Amazon has bought out several companies, including buying popular online shoe retailer Zappos for $1.2 billion (£958m) in 2009. The company’s portfolio also includes Audible, IMDB and Twitch. In 2013 Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million (£199.5m). 

Some centers are so large that the ‘pick ambassadors’ – the employees that collect order items – can walk over 10 miles a day retrieving items. To help its warehouse workers, Amazon now uses robots to assist. The robots are made by Kiva Systems, a company Amazon acquired in 2012 for $775 million (£618.3m).

In an effort to reduce the number of unmotivated warehouse employees at its fulfilment centers, Amazon launched a Pay to Quit program in 2014. If a worker handed in their resignation, they would get $3,000 (£2,393) to start their own Amazon delivery business. Those employees who took up the offer would also have access to Amazon's delivery service to get their business off the ground. Nowadays, the amount has been raised to $5,000 (£3,989). Less than 10% of the first wave of staffers offered the deal took them up on it.

In October 2018, Amazon topped 600,000 global employees for the first time, with the absorption of grocery chain Whole Foods in August 2017 adding another 87,000 workers to its head count.

Many of Amazon’s previous employees have gone on to start their own billion-dollar companies. These include Jason Kilar (pictured), who founded American online streaming service Hulu – valued at $15 billion (£12bn) in April 2019 – and Charlie Cheever, who created question and answer site Quora – valued at $2 billion (£1.6bn) in May 2019.   

The humble beginnings of the world's biggest businesses

When the same-day Prime service was launched in Manhattan, New York, the company claims one customer got their item – an Easy-Bake Oven – in a record 23 minutes.

Fittingly, when Amazon was developing its first e-reader it used a code name from a work of literature: Neal Stephenson’s Sci-Fi novel The Diamond Age, which is about an interactive, networked book that contains the sum of human knowledge. Fiona, a character from the novel, was used as a code name long before Kindle came into being. The original name is still tucked into the URL for the kindle management page, which is www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/manage.

 

In 2018 it was reported that Amazon reaches a massive 1.2 billion online global population, ships to more than 100 countries and has 310 million active customers across the globe. Not only that but the "everything store" dominates the e-commerce market, making up 45% of the industry according to a report by Bloomberg.

On Cyber Monday and Black Friday in 2018, Amazon broke sales records. It was reported that customers ordered 180 million products during the five days between Thanksgiving (November 22) and Cyber Monday (November 26), with Amazon reporting that the latter was its biggest shopping day ever, although it did not release sales figures.

Prime Day was a big hit on its first outing in 2015. Online retail tracker ChannelAdvisor estimated its US sales rocketed by 93%, while sales in Europe rose by 53%. It has since grown, and will be a 48-hour extravaganza this July.

From humble beginnings to worldwide success, Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is now worth an estimated $164.1 billion (£131bn) according to Forbes. Despite having a rocky year in 2019, finalising a $38 billion (£30.3bn) divorce settlement with his now-ex-wife MacKenzie on July 5, he's still the richest man in the world.

Find out more about Amazon in Governments who have taken on the world's biggest companies