Amazon
Amazon, Inc is an American multinational technology company
that focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial
intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential
economic and cultural forces in the world", and is one of the world's most
valuable brands. It is one of the Big Five American information technology
companies, alongside Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos from his garage in
Bellevue, Washington, on July 5, 1994. Initially an online marketplace for
books, it has expanded into a multitude of product categories: a strategy that
has earned it the moniker The Everything Store. It has multiple subsidiaries
including Amazon Web Services (cloud computing), Zoox (autonomous vehicles), Kuiper
Systems (satellite Internet), Amazon Lab126 (computer hardware R&D). Its
other subsidiaries include Ring, Twitch, IMDb, and Whole Foods Market. Its
acquisition of Whole Foods in August 2017 for US$13.4 billion substantially
increased its footprint as a physical retailer.
Walmart
Walmart is an American multinational retail corporation that
operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount
department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquartered in
Bentonville, Arkansas. The company was founded by Sam Walton in nearby Rogers,
Arkansas in 1962 and incorporated under Delaware General Corporation Law on
October 31, 1969. It also owns and operates Sam's Club retail warehouses.
As of January 31, 2022, Walmart has 10,593 stores and clubs
in 24 countries, operating under 46 different names. The company operates under
the name Walmart in the United States and Canada, as Walmart de México y
Centroamérica in Mexico and Central America, and as Flipkart Wholesale in
India. It has wholly-owned operations in Chile, Canada, and South Africa. Since
August 2018, Walmart holds only a minority stake in Walmart Brasil, which was
renamed Grupo Big in August 2019, with 20 percent of the company's shares, and
private equity firm Advent International holding 80 percent ownership of the
company.
Ali Express
AliExpress is an online retail service based in China and
owned by the Alibaba Group. Launched in 2010, it is made up of small businesses
in China and other locations, such as Singapore, that offer products to
international online buyers. It is the most visited e-commerce website in
Russia and was the 10th most popular website in Brazil. It facilitates small
businesses to sell to customers all over the world. AliExpress has drawn
comparison to eBay, as sellers are independent and use the platform to offer
products to buyers.
AliExpress started as a business-to-business buying and
selling portal. It has since expanded to business-to-consumer,
consumer-to-consumer, cloud computing, and payment services, as well. As of
2016, AliExpress ran websites in English, Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian,
German, Polish, Turkish, Portuguese, Indonesian and Russian languages.
Customers outside the countries for these languages are automatically served
the English version of the service. AliExpress is often used by e-commerce
stores that use a dropship business model.
eBay
eBay is an American multinational e-commerce corporation
based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and
business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre
Omidyar in 1995 and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. eBay
is a multibillion-dollar business with operations in about 32 countries, as of
2019. The company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping
website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and
services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are
charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and an
additional or separate fee when those items are sold.
In addition to eBay's original auction-style sales, the
website has evolved and expanded to include: instant "Buy It Now"
shopping; shopping by Universal Product Code, ISBN, or other kind of SKU number
and other services. eBay previously offered online money transfers as part of
its services
Etsy
Etsy, is an American e-commerce company focused on handmade
or vintage items and craft supplies. These items fall under a wide range of
categories, including jewelry, bags, clothing, home décor and furniture, toys,
art, as well as craft supplies and tools. Items described as vintage must be at
least 20 years old. The site follows in the tradition of open craft fairs,
giving sellers personal storefronts where they list their goods for a fee of
US$0.20 per item.
As of December 31, 2018, Etsy had over 60 million items in
its marketplace, and the online marketplace for handmade and vintage goods
connected 2.1 million sellers with 39.4 million buyers. At the end of 2018,
Etsy had 874 employees. In 2018, Etsy had total sales, or Gross Merchandise
Sales (GMS), of US$3.93 billion on the platform. In 2018, Etsy garnered revenue of US$603.7 million and registered a net income of US$41.25 million.
The platform generates revenue primarily from three streams: its Marketplace
revenue includes a fee of 6.5% of final sale value,which an Etsy seller pays
for each completed transaction, on top of a listing fee of 20 cents per item;
Seller Services, Etsy's fastest growing revenue stream, includes fees for
services such as "Promoted Listings", payment processing, and
purchases of shipping labels through the platform; while Other revenue includes
fees received from third-party payment processors.
Asos
ASOS is a British
online fashion and cosmetic retailer. The company was founded in 2000 in
London, primarily aimed at young adults. The website sells over 850 brands as
well as its own range of clothing and accessories, and ships to all 196
countries from fulfillment centers in the UK, USA and Europe.
ASOS originally stood for AsSeenOnScreen with the tagline
"Buy what you see on film and TV" because it exclusively sold
imitations of clothing from those mediums (for example, Brad Pitt's red leather
jacket from the 1999 film Fight Club). However, it no longer has that meaning
and is generally stylised as an uppercase acronym, although the company's logo
represents it in lower case.
Target
Target Corporation is
an American big box department store chain headquartered in Minneapolis,
Minnesota. It is the eighth largest retailer in the United States, and a
component of the S&P 500 Index. Target established itself as the discount
division of the Dayton's Company of Minneapolis in 1962. It began expanding the
store nationwide in the 1980s (as part of the Dayton-Hudson Corporation), and
introduced new store formats under the Target brand in the 1990s. The company
has found success as a cheap-chic player in the industry. The parent company
was renamed Target Corporation in 2000, and divested itself of its last
department store chains in 2004. It suffered from a massive, highly publicized
security breach of customer credit card data and the failure of its short-lived
Target Canada subsidiary in the early 2010s, but experienced revitalized
success with its expansion in urban markets within the United States.
As of 2019, Target operates 1,931 stores throughout the
United States, and is ranked number 37 on the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the
largest U.S. corporations by total revenue. Their retail formats include the
discount store Target, the hypermarket SuperTarget, and
"small-format" stores previously named CityTarget and TargetExpress
before being consolidated under the Target branding.
Boohoo
Boohoo is a British
online fashion retailer, aimed at 16–30-year-olds. The business was founded in
2006 and had sales in 2019 of £856.9 million. It specializes in own-brand
fashion clothing, with over 36,000 products. Growing rapidly, the company has
acquired the brands and online presence of several defunct high street
retailers and has also seen controversy over working conditions at some of its
suppliers.
Boohoo was founded in 2006 by Mahmud Kamani and Carol Kane,
who respectively serve as group executive chairman and an executive director,
and who previously supplied high street chains such as Primark and New Look.
The company completed its initial public offering (IPO) in March 2014, with its
shares trading considerably above the 50p float price on the company's debut in
the AIM sub-market of the London Stock Exchange. Valuing Boohoo at almost £600
million, the floatation saw Kamani net £135 million and Kane £25 million.
Nasty Gal
Nasty Gal is an American retailer that specializes in
fashion for young women. The company has customers in over 60 countries.
Founded by Sophia Amoruso in 2006, Nasty Gal was named “Fastest Growing
Retailer” in 2012 by INC Magazine. Nasty Gal is based in Los Angeles. In 2017,
the company was purchased by the BooHoo Group out of Chapter 11 of the U.S.
Bankruptcy Code.
In 2006, while working as a campus safety host at Academy of
Art University, Amoruso launched an eBay store based in San Francisco, selling
old pieces of clothing. The store was named Nasty Gal Vintage, the name being
inspired by Betty Davis. The eBay store sold vintage fashion that Amoruso
sourced from secondhand stores.
Shopbop
Shopbop was founded by Bob Lamey, Martha Graettinger, and
venture investor Ray Zemon in November 1999 in Madison, Wisconsin. It was
originally the internet presence of brick and mortar clothing dealer Bop in
downtown Madison (the shop was closed in 2014). Graettinger and Lamey chose
Madison because it was a college town with a strong fashion-conscious student
base.
Shopbop was acquired by Amazon.com on February 2006. At the
time of the deal it was selling 103 different lines of high-end clothing. Since
the acquisition Shopbop ran almost completely independently from Amazon, that
also sells clothes and accessories, and even competed with it. In September
2013 Shopbop opened the East Dane contemporary menswear website.
The website went through several redesigns, particularly in
2012and 2017 (among the redesigns, a loyalty program was added to the website).