During Amazon's Cyber Monday Deals Week, you'll find the best deals on popular holiday products and gift items for a whole week, not just one day. Amazon is known for its incredible selection of merchandise, and for an entire week you can find deals in every category. Get free Amazon gift cards with select orders. To stay on top of the sales, download the Amazon mobile app, sign up for emails, like Amazon on Facebook and follow @amazondeals on Twitter.
In November 2013, Amazon.com announced a partnership with the United States Postal Service to begin delivering orders on Sundays. The service, included in Amazon's standard shipping rates, initiated in metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and New York due to the high-volume and inability to deliver timely, with plans to expand into Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix by 2014.[79]
Amazon was founded in 1994 around Bezos' desire to start an internet-based business, with the goal of selling items online emerging as an early and obvious inroad into the dot-com boom. A former Wall Street worker with electrical engineering and computer science degrees, Bezos zeroed in on books as a viable initial product category for his online store due to the universality of literature, the existing stock of print books, and the relatively low price of each unit. Bezos briefly considered naming his company Relentless.com — an early sign of the man's tenacious business mindset — but friends and family suggested it was too malevolent sounding. Relentless.com, which Bezos bought roughly 24 years ago, still redirects to Amazon.com. The company now controls almost half of all print book sales in the US.
Audible.com is a seller and producer of spoken audio entertainment, information and educational programming on the Internet. Audible sells digital audiobooks, radio and TV programs and audio versions of magazines and newspapers. Through its production arm, Audible Studios, Audible has also become the world's largest producer of downloadable audiobooks. On January 31, 2008, Amazon announced it would buy Audible for about $300 million. The deal closed in March 2008 and Audible became a subsidiary of Amazon.[90]
With Prime Pantry, which also launched in 2014, Amazon honed its focus on competing with the Walmarts and pharmacies of the world by giving Prime subscribers an easy way to fill one giant box with household supplies and other nonperishable goods. In 2015, Amazon launched a home services arm for everything from house cleanings and oil changes to furniture assembly and theater installation.
Amazon is known today not just as the everything store, but as the creator of Alexa, one of the most pervasive digital voice assistants on the market today. As an extension of Alexa, Amazon has become more than just a seller of other people's products. It's now a hardware maker (Fire Phone aside), having embarked on its boldest product play since the original Kindle when it decided to develop its own line of smart speakers to house its artificial intelligence software. Once again, the division responsible for this piece of hardware was Lab126, Amazon's hardware arm that gave it the tools to dominate the e-reader market nearly a decade prior.
Vince Offer is a famous director, comedian, and commercial pitchman who made his name promoting the ShamWow. Using his natural charisma and his ability to add double entendres to his pitches, Vince turned the commercial into a major career move. The ShamWow itself is one of the most successful cleaning products on the market today, and Vince himself has gone on to pitch several other As Seen on TV products.