(By Salman - iStockAnalyst Writer)Online retailer Amazon has continued to defy naysayers with its ability to defy gravity and has been significantly, and relentlessly eating away rival eBay's market share.

The Seattle, Washington USA based company has weathered recession pretty well and outpaced its rivals in 2008, a year marked by a great deal of turmoil. According to a survey by Compete.com, the domain amazon.com attracted at least 615 million visitors annually in 2008 which was twice that of walmart.com. The company even had a strong holiday season at a time when most of the traditional retailers were having tough time attracting shoppers.

Late in April, the company reported quarterly results that beat analyst expectations by wide margins. First quarter Net income jumped to $177 million, or 41 cents a share, on revenue of $4.89 billion, $143 million, or 34 cents a share, in the year ago quarter. Revenue surged 18% to $4.89 billion. Analysts on average were looking for earnings of 31 cents a share on revenue of $4.75 billion. Operating margins were 5% for the quarter -- far ahead of consensus expectations

Launched in 1995 as an on-line bookstore, Amazon has steadily branched into retail sales of music CDs, videotapes and DVDs, software, consumer electronics, kitchen items, tools, lawn and garden items, toys & games, baby products, apparel, sporting goods, gourmet food, jewelry, watches, health and personal-care items, beauty products, musical instruments, clothing, industrial & scientific supplies, groceries, and more. The company is now the largest online retailer and is fast gaining ground against traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.

RBC Capital analyst Stephen Ju asserts that Amazon.com “may be facilitating close to a third of all e-commerce in the U.S.,” and that it continues to gain share here. Ju suggested that the total share of U.S. e-commerce through Amazon was about 34% in Q4 2008, up from 27% a year earlier.

Thanks to the consistent innovation, the company has been successfully able to project itself as internet's biggest opportunity. Amazon launched its new e-book reader Kindle 2 in February, featuring improved battery life, 20 pecent faster page-refreshing, a text-to-speech option to read the text aloud. Early in May, Amazon.com debuted a new, large-screen version of its popular Kindle e-book reader Wednesday in an effort to broaden the appeal of the device to readers of newspapers, magazines and textbooks.