Amazon as a business has come a very significant way since 1994 when it was first founded as Cadabra, then a year later changing the name to Amazon. The reason the company was started was to first enter the rapidly expanding internet market as Amazon.com. Whilst the concept of the business could very easily be copied, many other businesses have been copied and continued to grow massively and be very profitable, such as McDonalds.

The first products to be sold on Amazon were mostly limited to books. A clever market strategy, offering these books in many countries via the internet. Books themselves come in millions of forms and were popular with millions more, this was successful and led to rapid growth. The internet allowed Amazon in just two months to sell across the US as well as 45 other countries, there was a huge market to be worked with. In this 2 month period sales were up to $20,000 a week.

From this it is clear that there was a gap in the market which was easily exploited and led to rapid growth on a scale not predicted by founder Jeff Bezos. Some businesses struggle to make $20,000 per annum on startup, let alone a week.
The internet opened up a huge market for a hugely popular product which was always going to lead to success. At this stage casual use of the internet was very new and most people still went to stores to purchase books, for people with internet access and a computer they now did not need to and Amazon was one of the only, if not the only online bookseller to be offering this service. It was convenient for people and that was something very new and very rare.
Obviously being only web based on startup Amazon did alienate many hundreds of millions of potential customers who did not have computers, however it could be argued that this does not matter since with modernisation a computer would eventually become common in households and