History of e-commerce, how and when were online stores born?

History of e-commerce, how and when were online stores born?

Have you ever wondered how e-commerce was born? Or when was the first online store born? The first e-commerce was born much later in time than you might imagine. We are in 1982 and an act that will be revolutionary takes place in the world: the creation of the first virtual shop .

The birth of e-commerce

The roots of the first e-commerce can be found as early as 1970 when EDI ( Electronic Data Interchange) was born. It was the first electronic service through which documents were transferred for large telecommunications companies. With the birth of the World Wide Web and the advent of the nineties, this system went to integrate with the public network. The first form of sale, however, considered the forerunner of e-commerce was Minitel, in 1982 . It was a tool born from Videotex – a kind of today’s teletext – which allowed you to buy products from local shops. Thus the history of the first “online” shop windows in the world was written .

Getting closer to what is our current concept of e-commerce we go to 1992, with the online bookstore Book Stacks Unlimited (which will become Books.com), created by Charles M. Stack in the early 1990s. According to sources now distant in time and on the web, the first real online purchase takes place a couple of years later, in 1994, precisely on 11 August . On this date, entrepreneur Dan Kohn, via an embryonic e-commerce called NetMarket, sold a Sting album which was bought in Philadelphia for $ 12.48.

In July 1995 another date entered the history of e-commerce: Jeff Bezos, from his garage in Seattle, shipped the first book purchased on Amazon.com. Ecommerce begins its path of success destined to last even today. In search of e-commerce fulfillment, amazon created the first customer-oriented e-commerce, that is, with the ability to search for products based on your need. Just four years later, in 1999, Bezis was declared “Person of the Year” by Time magazine. His intuition of giving life to an e-commerce for the purchase and sale of books with the possibility of searching for the desired product had marked an era.

Also in the mid-nineties, the 28-year-old computer scientist Pierre Omidyar created the first portal for online auctions called AuctionWeb . Haven’t you ever heard of it? Yes, because today it is known as eBay ! Thus was born a truly revolutionary portal, where anyone could become an entrepreneur on the web simply by posting an ad.

The first online purchase in Italy and the 2000s

On June 3, 1998 , the first purchase took place on an e-commerce in Italy . The IBS.it platform had only been online for 35 minutes and the first payment on an Italian e-commerce took place. The purchase came from California, the product was the book “La Concessione del Telefono” by Andrea Camilleri. The Bel Paese was also starting to trade online, giving way to a sales channel destined for global success.

In the 2000s, e-commerce began to spread like wildfire. With the birth of high-speed ADSL,

online stores begin to flourish on the web. E-commerce business began to multiply to such an extent that security standards were regulated in 2004: the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI) was born. Within a few years, with the arrival of smartphones, online stores will become increasingly busy and the first purchases from mobile phones will take off .

E-commerce becomes a global success

Today, there are nearly 5 billion people connected to the Internet around the world. there are so many products including newborn baby care products, and nursing products which were not easily availbale online in the past time are now available at on click away  E-commerce has continued to grow exponentially, so much so that during the lockdown phase in Italy , companies found their safe haven in web shops. The world market sees a strong presence of e-commerce in the Asia-Pacific area , which undoubtedly holds the leadership of world trade with a production of 1892 billion dollars. In Europe , every year, at least 69% of the population makes an online purchase , to the point that retail sales already reached a production of 342 billion euros in 2018.

According to “Sarah Ross, Co-founder of CocoLoan in  italy, consumers stand out for a particular record: we are the people who buy the most from smartphones. According to a Mastercard research , 85% of Italians buy products online from smartphones , while the average in the rest of Europe is around 80%.