Amazon started in a two-bedroom house in Seattle. The location was chosen because of its proximity to Ingram, a book wholesaler and because of the wealth of talented programmers in the area. In the garage of that house, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, stockpiled books and set up three Sun Microsystems computers to take book orders online. In 1995, Jeff opened his online bookstore to the public. At that time, there was only one kind of seller, in fact, there was only one seller, Jeff . He only sold one type of product: books. Soon after the start of Amazon, the garage became too small to run the business.

Since 1995, the number of sellers has grown, the types of sellers have grown, and the product offerings have grown. All of these sellers come together to sell their items on www.amazon.com, in what is called the "marketplace."

Individual sellers cannot have their own storefront in the marketplace. Pro Merchant Sellers and Merchant@ vendors can. Individual sellers can, however, set up their own storefronts outside of the marketplace. These storefronts can be accessed through www.amazon.com. Amazon refers to these stores as zShops.

Product Advertising API requests cannot access zShops. This usually has little impact on product searches because zShop owners can also list their items for sale in the Amazon marketplace.