July 16, 1995: The Launch of Amazon.com as an Online Bookstore

On July 16, 1995, Amazon.com went live. Jeff Bezos launched it as an online bookstore, even though his long-term vision was to build a store that could sell almost anything.

The very first customer order was placed on launch day. The site offered access to about one million book titles—far more than any physical bookstore could stock. Within just a few weeks, Amazon was receiving orders from nearly every U.S. state and dozens of countries.

Amazon proved that people were willing to shop online. The company later expanded far beyond books, launching services such as Amazon Marketplace, Prime, and AWS, and grew into one of the world’s largest technology companies.

See also How Jeff Bezos Founded Amazon in 1994.