Early e-commerce Ventures and Their Limitations

Last week, I started off by describing how e-commerce removes many of the headaches that physical stores have. Yet despite the opportunities offered, it is important to remember that early e-commerce ventures did not have many of these luxuries that we take for granted today. The industry has transformed itself dramatically in the last 15 years.

The earliest e-commerce ventures are now also the most famous – at least those that still exist. Although the World Wide Web was introduced in 1990, it was not until 1995 that two of the best known sites today were launched: Amazon.com and Craigslist. EBay followed a year later.
All three of these early e-commerce sites represent very different types of online commerce. Amazon.com follows a more traditional store format, with set prices and one major seller (although Amazon Marketplace allows small time sellers to advertise their offerings on Amazon’s product pages). EBay provides regulation and a meeting space for buyers and sellers to come together, with most sales taking place in the auction format. Craigslist is the least involved, offering little more than a community message board where people can buy or sell directly from one another.

If you shopped online in the early days of e-commerce, you know that the experience was very different from what you experience today. E-commerce websites were much more limited in what they could do in graphics and appearance as well as in coding and programming. Fewer sellers offered conveniences such as the ability to place and order instantly with their credit card, or buyer accounts that stored payment settings and purchase history. SSL encryption was introduced in 1999, enabling some online stores to offer secure transactions, but the technology was not as common – or as expected – as it is today.

In general, it was very difficult to engage in e-commerce in the early days as there simply weren’t many options available and the process was difficult. Fortunately that has changed. There has been an explosion of digital services companies that have lowered the barrier an increased the ease to enter and operate an e-commerce store and organizations like Webgistix have played an important role streamlining the physical back end processes. I will write more about in my next post.