It comes as no surprise: eCommerce has gone from being the newcomer on the block to the bully—challenging the traditional, brick-and-mortar model as we know it. Especially, now as online purchases surge during the pandemic. We digress. We’re not here to predict the future, but rather look at what we can learn from the past.
For our purposes, we’re going to define eCommerce as the purchase of an item or service and the payment for that purchase happening entirely in the digital space. Depending on when you decide to say eCommerce started, as an industry, it’s between 25 and 50 years old, which means the evolution of eCommerce is still in its infancy, as industries go.
When Did eCommerce Begin?
The beginning of our tale is a murky one. There’s an urban legend that the first bout of online shopping that ever occurred was in 1971 or 1972, between students at Stanford and MIT. One group had weed, the other wanted it, so they used the nascent ARPANET (the modern internet’s grandaddy) to make a deal. But for most, the modern internet didn’t start till after Sir Tim Berners-Lee unleashed the World Wide Web upon the world in 1991. There’s disagreement about whether the true “first sale” online was the purchase of a Pizza Hut pizza, a Sting CD, or a sale of computer equipment on the Internet Shopping Network, but all of these transactions took place in 1994. So if you’re looking for a kick-off year, that’s it.
And like you’d expect in any burgeoning industry, the evolution of eCommerce has been fraught with what we would call vestigial offshoots, with the dotcom bubble being the prime example. So many eCommerce websites like boo.com, books-a-million, pets.com, and many more rose to titanic prominence, only to fall. The crater their failure created stalled the US economy from around 1998 until 2002. Whether through negligence, overzealous optimism, or just bad luck, thousands of companies have been opened and shuttered in the age of eCommerce.
Curious about why some companies failed and some didn’t? In our view, it’s inflexibility. If you feel like your business is too rigid, especially given the actively changing nature of the world right now, check out our “should you rebrand yourself” business guide.
A quick eCommerce timeline. . .
Current and Upcoming Trends in eCommerce
So the big question is, what’s next? What trends are going to be vestigial, falling off in a few years or clinging to life off of name recognition and old people who can’t update their cell phones, and which are going to be the next Amazon? And more importantly, how do you make sure you’re flexible enough to endure the shifting sands of eCommerce?
