Amazon made web-based book selling mainstream. Emphasis on web. Of course it was a tech company.

And the web based dvd rental then ? I mean, they were doing exactly the same as Amazon, why distinguish?

Banks have online customer sites. Are they tech companies?

If they did it when Amazon started their web store they would be.

How do you think Amazon infra gave birth to AWS? Does that sound to you like something a retail company would do?

Banks are tech companies, the business leadership just don't know it.

The business leadership of some banks do in fact know it.

It was an online website right around the dot com bubble.

It definitely was a tech company by that time’s standards.

Nowadays every company has an online store, but that was not the case when Amazon was selling books online that you usually had to go to a store for.

> It was an online website right around the dot com bubble.

Much sooner than that.

Amazon started in 1995. Not a lot of ecommerce websites existed then. One the earlier ones is Powell's Books which started selling in 1993 via telnet, in 1994 via web.