A Short History of Online Shopping
Online shopping was really able to start with the beginning of online banking in 1994
. The Stanford Federal Union was the first bank to allow online internet banking, while other banks had been experimenting with other types of home banking for about a decade before this.Surprisingly enough, it was the popular pizza restaurant Pizza Hut that was the first company to offer online shopping. Their restaurant in Santa Cruz, California, allowed people to order pizzas online, and it was not long before this option was available for Pizza Huts throughout the USA.
Both Amazon.com and eBay started in 1995, and they are still the two largest online stores. According to Alexa, Amazon.com is the 15th most popular site on the internet, and eBay is at number 21.
Amazon was started by Jeff Bezos out of his garage in Washington State in the US. He first meant for it to be simply a book store, but soon it grew into selling everything from hardware, to music, to clothing and jewelry. The Amazon.com model has been used by a number of different sites, leading online shopping away from being simply a type of catalogue shopping to the type of site we see today.
The beginning of eBay is a bit more strange. Pierre Omidyar was creating an online auction site as part of his own website, and placed a broken laser pointer up for sale as an experiment. He was so surprised when someone bought it that he contacted the buyer, and was told that he (the buyer) collected broken laser pointers. From this he realised that there is a market for just about everything (including one cooked brussel sprout, and a single cornflake that vaguely resembled ET as he later discovered), and so began eBay.
Since then, hundreds of thousands of businesses have added online shopping or e-commerce functions to their website. They offer numerous ways to pay, from electronic transfers, to credit cards, to vouchers. These types of sites and businesses really have made a huge change in the way we purchase things.
A Short History of Online Shopping
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