Probably the best known and most successful e-commerce web site on the World Wide Web. Amazon's success has come from offering books, music cds, movie videos and dvds and much more at discount prices. Amazon also include facilities that allows you to sell books "second hand" once you have read them or to beable to buy second hand books. Amazon also includes a comprehensive review system supplied by users who have bought and used products you are interested in buying. Amazon.com also introduced a tool that lets people search the entire text of many books it sells, the online retailer reported a boost in sales as a result of the feature.

Homepage US - Amazon US

Homepage German - Amazon De

Homepage France - Amazon Fr

Homepage UK - Amazon UK

As a customer of Amazon in the UK I would personally sum the site Advantages as

• Massive choice of products
• Low and competitive prices for cds, dvds and computer games
• Good customer service response to emails I have sent
  

Disadvantages as,

• High postage rates
• Apart from this they are in my opinion the best UK site for shopping.

The US Amazon site (29.12.2003) currently uses two large HP Superdome servers. Each Superdome runs a large Oracle database. One is used for a staging area and is connected to 17 Virtual Array 7100s. It prepares the data so it can be used for reports. The second Superdome is the actual data warehouse and is connected to 39 Virtual Array 7100s. Software wise they use a Linux-based operating environment across Amazon.com's entire global enterprise offered obvious benefits, including cost-saving flexibility, scalability and ease-of-use.

Amazon also have a developer's kit for webmasters to show Amazon's products on their web sites. This can help web sites generate income to pay for hosting and scripting bills. Webmasters however have to have access to either SOAP or XML over HTTP on their server so that Amazon's content can be directly loaded into their Web sites. The Amazon associates program was first introduced in 1996 and has been one of the major factors in Amazon's current success. It now means UK webmasters can,

• Build a recommendations engine using their “similarities” features.
  
• Enable your visitors to add items to their Amazon shopping carts without leaving your Web site
• Retrieve price and availability information in real-time.
  
• Generate lists of best-selling products on the fly.
  
• Display Amazon.com search results directly on your Web pages.

You can find further information at Amazon Web Services