Amazon.com : Products and services

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Amazon.com has incorporated a number of products and services into its shopping model, either through development or acquisition.


2001
Honor System and donations
The Honor System was originally launched in 2001 to allow customers to make donations or buy digital content, with Amazon collecting 2.9 percent of the payment plus a flat fee of $0.30 USD.

2002
Web Services
Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002. The service provides programmatic access to many features leveraged behind the scenes on its website.

2004
Amazon also created "channels" to benefit certain causes. In 2004, Amazon's "Presidential Candidates" allowed customers to donate US$5-200 to the campaigns of 2004 U.S. presidential hopefuls. Amazon has periodically reactivated a Red Cross donation channel after such tragedies as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. After the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Amazon set up an online donation channel to the American Red Cross, waiving its processing fee. As of January 2005, over 162,000 individuals had donated over US$13.1 million.[citation needed] Similar channels were set up for the British, Canadian, French, German and Japanese Red Cross organizations. Over 7,000 Britons donated more than US$350,000; 900 Canadians over US$56,000; 660 French over US$23,000; 2,900 Germans over US$145,000; and 1,900 Japanese over US$66,000.[citation needed]


2005
Prime
Amazon Prime offers customers free 2-day and discounted priority shipping for a yearly fee of US$ 79. Amazon launched the program in the continental United States in 2005, Japan in June 2007 and the United Kingdom and Germany in November 2007.
Shorts
Launched in 2005, Amazon Shorts offers exclusive short form content, including short stories and non-fiction pieces from best-selling authors, all available for immediate download at US$.49. As of June 2007, the program has over 1,700 pieces and is adding about 50 new pieces per week.
Mechanical Turk
In November 2005, Amazon.com began testing Amazon Mechanical Turk, an application programming interface (API) allowing programs to dispatch tasks to human processors.

2006
S3
In March 2006, Amazon launched an online storage service called Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). An unlimited number of data objects, from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes in size, can be stored in S3 and distributed via HTTP or BitTorrent. The service charges monthly fees for data stored and for data transferred.
Discussion boards
In August 2006, Amazon launched product wikis (later folded into Amapedia) and discussion forums for certain products using guidelines that follow standard message board conventions.
EC2
In August 2006, Amazon introduced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a virtual site farm, allowing users to use the Amazon infrastructure with its high reliability to run diverse applications ranging from running simulations to web hosting.

2007
Amapedia
In January 2007 Amazon launched Amapedia, a collaborative wiki for user-generated content to replace ProductWiki.
Unbox
In March 2007, Amazon launched an online video on demand service, which has been criticized for its use of digital rights management (DRM).[citation needed]
MP3 downloads
In September 2007, Amazon launched a new music store (currently in beta) called Amazon MP3, which sells downloadable tracks, all in the MP3 format and most recorded at 256 kilobits per second variable bitrate (VBR).[28] Amazon's terms of use agreements legally restrict use of the music, but Amazon does not use DRM to enforce those terms.[29]
Amazon MP3 is selling music from the Big 4 record labels, EMI, Universal, Warner Bros. Records, and Sony BMG, as well as many independents; as of January 2008 they are the only store to sell DRM-free music from all Big 4 labels.[30][31][32][33] Previous to the launch of this service, Amazon made an investment in Amie Street, a similar music store with a variable pricing model based on demand.[34]
Vine
In August 2007 Amazon launched Amazon Vine, which allows top product reviewers free access to pre-release products from vendors participating in the program.
FPS
In August 2007 Amazon launched a payment service specifically targeted at developers. Amazon FPS has facilities for developing many different charging models including micro-payments. The service also gives developers easy access to Amazon customers.
Kindle
In November 2007, Amazon launched Amazon Kindle, an e-book reader which downloads content over "Whispernet," a free EV-DO wireless service on the Sprint Nextel network. Initial offerings include approximately 115,000 books, newspapers, magazines and blogs.[citation needed] The screen uses E Ink technology to reduce battery consumption.
SimpleDB
In December 2007, Amazon introduced SimpleDB, a database system, allowing users of its other infrastructure to utilize a high reliability high performance database system.

2008
Amazon MP3
In January 2008 Amazon announced they would be rolling out their Amazon MP3 service to their subsidiary websites worldwide throughout the year.[35]


Connect
Amazon Connect enables authors to post remarks on their book pages and to customers who have bought their books.
WebStore
WebStore by Amazon allows businesses to create e-commerce websites using Amazon technology. Merchants can customize their sites using their own photos and branding. Sellers pay a commission of 7 percent, which includes credit-card processing fees and fraud protection, and a subscription fee of $59.95/month for an unlimited number of webstores and listings.