Amazon hits 1.3 crore orders in a day, but one of its first orders came from this country—paid in cash and hidden in a floppy disk

Amazon hits 1.3 crore orders in a day, but one of its first orders came from this country—paid in cash and hidden in a floppy disk

We all know the story of the first. For Amazon, that person is officially John Wainwright, an Australian engineer in California. On April 3, 1995, he became the company's first non-company customer, buying a book on computer intelligence. A clean, digital transaction that sits neatly in the history books.

But another of Amazon's very first customers had a story that was far more strange. It arrived not from Silicon Valley, but from a place where the internet was still a rumour: Bulgaria.

Just days after that first sale, another order trickled in. This was 1995. In Bulgaria, the web was a ghost town, and paying for something across the ocean with a credit card was practically science fiction. So this customer got creative.

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The order presented Amazon with its first true puzzle. The payment wasn't a credit card number. It was a floppy disk.

When the disk arrived in Seattle, an employee popped it into a computer, expecting a file. Instead, they found a note. It explained that the customer had folded two crisp $100 bills and carefully slid them inside the disk's tiny metal shutter.

The logic was brilliantly simple, almost like a spy novel. The customer reasoned that customs inspectors might steal cash from an envelope, but they wouldn't be able to read the English note. And who would bother to open a seemingly useless, outdated piece of computer hardware?

It worked.

Amazon’s team fished out the money, completed the book order, and in that moment, something was proven. It wasn't just that people would buy books online. It was that they would go to incredible, almost absurd lengths to do so. They would hide cash in a floppy disk and mail it across the world, betting on a company that, at the time, was little more than a website.

So while John Wainwright holds the official title, this anonymous Bulgarian customer holds a different kind of honour: one of the first people to pass Amazon a secret test. A test of trust, creativity and the sheer will to get a book delivered.