In the Beginning
Not to take anything away from the way Amazon has revolutionized the way we all shop, but they weren’t the first to venture into the realm of e-commerce.- According to Miva, “Online shopping was invented and pioneered in 1979 by Michael Aldrich in the United Kingdom. He connected a modified domestic television via a telephone line to a real-time multi-user transaction processing computer. The system was marketed beginning in 1980 and offered mainly business-to-business systems that were sold in the UK, Ireland, and Spain.’
- Who knows, Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, might have decided to launch his online venture with books because of the success of Book Stacks Unlimited, which was founded by Charles M. Stack. “Stack’s store began as a dial-up bulletin board two years before Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos,” Miva tells us in their history of e-commerce. “In 1994, Book Stacks Unlimited moved to the Internet as Books.com and was eventually acquired by Barnes & Noble.”