25 years of the Commercial Internet
Part 2. The e-Commerce Years 1995-2000
By 1995 those ahead of the curve were now online. Success could be measured via clear business objectives. The most direct path to ROI for the typical business was the relatively new notion of e-commerce. The larger retailers saw big dollars in turning their bricks and mortar into clicks and web pages. As America got busy lining the highways with strip malls and big box plazas, so too did they get busy on the information highway. These were the salad days for a guy like me. Eight out of ten times, the sites I designed in this era had a shopping basket somewhere.
One of the big ones I worked on was Sears Canada (launched 1998). Due to its well-established catalog business in rural areas, Sears.ca quickly became the largest e-commerce site in Canada and possibly the world. Sales rumoured to have peaked with over 1 million shopping baskets totaling an estimated $40 million in revenue by 2001 – more than the rest of Canada’s e-commerce revenues combined.
Sears.ca circa 1998
“Long tail” newcomers like Amazon.com launched in 1995. The rise of peer-to-peer ecommerce sites like eBay started establishing social media principles a decade ahead of the term’s popularization. The era saw some spectacular multimillion dollar failures like Boo.com and, coupled with an unhealthy (irrational even?) fear of the Y2K bug, the “dot com” bubble burst over the faces of weeping NASDQ and VC investors.
Napster, the popular peer-to-peer music platform, launched in 1998 and set a new understanding of what peer-to-peer actually meant. The music industry lawyers jumped on it and by 2001, it was shut down — the major record labels’ collectivel lack of imagination failed to notice that this was biggest thing for them since pressed vinyl.
Let’s not forget about the quiet incorporation of Google.com in Sept. 1998. I remember the first Google search I ever performed. I was looking up photos *** from the Mars Pathfinder Mission ***. The search was successful and I have rarely used another search engine since. (post edited ***)
Google circa 1998
But not everybody is a retailer and Google needs content to fulfill what you’re looking for. Check back again for the next post in “The first 25 years of the Commercial Web” series: 2000-2005 The Advertising Years
25 years of the Commercial Internet 1990-2015
1990-1995 – The Brochureware Years
1995-2000 – The e-Commerce Years
2000-2005 – The Advertising Years
2005-2010 – Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years
2010-2015 – The Remix Years
Tweet This!
Print This Post
2 Responses to “The e-Commerce Years 1995-2000”
Leave a Reply
Additional comments powered by BackType
January 4th, 2010 at 9:59 am
The ecommerce years and the fetus of online community. http://bit.ly/6axKPb
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
September 30th, 2011 at 6:57 pm
[...] The e-Commerce Years 1995-2000 [...]