80 3 Retailing in Electronic Commerce: Products and Services, OPENING CASE AMAZON.COM—E-COMMERCE INNOVATOR The Problem In the early 1990s, entrepreneur Jeff Bezos saw an opportunity rather than a business problem. He decided that books were the most logical product for selling online, because they were the same product, regardless of how or where they were pur- chased. In July 1995, Bezos started Amazon.com (amazon.com) and began selling books online, Over the years, the com- pany has continually improved, expanded, changed its business model, and expanded its product selection, improving customer experience and adding new products and services and business alliances. The company also recognized the impor- tance of order fulfillment and warehousing early on, It has invested billions of dollars building physical warehouses and distribution centers designed for shipping packages to millions of customers. In 2012, the company started same-day deliv- ery from its new distribution center and in 2016 piloted the use of drones for this purpose. After 2000, the company added information technology products and services, notably Kindle e-teader family, Fire TV, Echo, and Web Services (cloud technologies). The company maintains a listing of its new and innovative products and services at amazon.com/p/feature/ tv76jef8g2289rm. In 2015, Amazon continued to heavily invest in Prime Video to actively compete with Netflix and Hulu (Trefis 2015), Amazon.com's challenge was, and still is, to profitably sell many consumer products and services online,