In 1994, the US chain started selling pizzas online through their early ‘PizzaNet’ portal – a flat, grey website that looks as ancient as you may expect, with fields only for a customer’s address and phone number.īut 1994 was also a watershed year for online shopping: it’s the same year Amazon launched – which, at that time, sold mostly books. And while today virtually all big corporations are online, in the early days only a few committed to an ecommerce strategy. The first purchase? A Sting CD, retailing at $12.48 (£10).įrom then, the early internet – with its screeching dial-up sounds – trickled its way into people’s homes. It was not only dubbed a “ new venture that is the equivalent of a shopping mall in cyberspace”, but also marked the first digitally secure transaction. “The system, which pre-dated the public Internet, relied upon the development of a closed network of computers.” Little did Aldrich or Snowball know that their nifty tech experiment laid the framework for an industry now worth £118bn ($186bn) in the UK.įollowing this early grocery service, the next major innovation in the online shopping space is said to have occurred in 1994, when a computer whiz called Daniel M Kohn, then aged 21, set up an online marketplace called NetMarket. “It was originally conceived as a social service ,” says Reynolds. The goods were then sent to her door, like magic.
#SHOP AT HOME ONLINE TV#
She used the ‘Videotex’ system developed by English inventor Michael Aldrich, says Jonathan Reynolds, associate professor in retail marketing and deputy dean of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. Aldrich took her TV and turned it into a computer terminal: she used the Videotex technology to generate a shopping list on her TV screen, and her order was phoned in to her local Tesco. In 1984, in Gateshead, England, a 72-year-old grandmother named Jane Snowball sat down in her armchair and used her television remote control to place an order of margarine, cornflakes and eggs.
So how did we get to the point where online shopping became a way of life? And where will it guide us in the post-pandemic future? Most people were only buying hard-to-find records or obscure action figures on eBay. A couple of decades ago, online shopping was a novelty, just as the internet itself still was. In May 2020, sales from “non-store retailers” in the US were up 30.8% from May 2019.īefore Covid-19, relying on the internet for shopping hadn't been so ingrained in our day-to-day lives. Amazon has been around since the mid-’90s, but by even 2010 in the US, online shopping only made up just more than 6% of all retail sales.Īnd now? Internet sales as a total percentage of sales in the UK rocketed from 2.8% in November 2006 to 18.9% in February 2020 – and then shot up again to 30% in April 2020 because of the pandemic. However, even though online shopping has been around for years – actually, decades – it’s only become truly mainstream recently. These things range from essentials to not-so-quite essentials: in Canada in April, online shoppers trapped at home were scooping up canned quail eggs, sitar strings and trampolines for the kids.įrom panic buying and hoarding, we already know that the stress of the pandemic can break our brains and morph our buying habits.
Groceries, books, beauty supplies, inflatable children’s pools as the pandemic persists, we have relied on ecommerce to get things to our doors, contact-free and fast. How many times have you clicked ‘check-out’ to buy something in the last few months? If the spike in online sales amid Covid-19 is any indicator (or, perhaps, the list of merchants on your last credit card statement), it’s probably a lot.
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