A cannabis sale between students from Stanford and MIT, “the seminal act of e-commerce”.This was very first online transaction itself, upon which the internet and e-commerce industry is based today. The ARPANET (a network that shares its similar with the modern,developed internet but a much smaller scale) was the very first public network which was introduced in 1976 to the public world, first estabhlished in around 2 dozen universities across the US in 1971.

 

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Early ARPANET integration between American universities

 

Fast forward to 1979, and Michael Aldrich, a British innovator, invented the first online shopping system using just a processor attached to a TV for input/output, creating a end-user info system. This terminal was used to deliver information between users This method was traditionally used by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the UK, as a method to display subtitles over the aerials.

Influenced through this innovation, France Telecom introduced Minitel, that allowed users to interact in not just e-commerce for buying plane tickets or products, but a plethora of end-to-end user purposes such as e-mails, databases, dating services and phone directories. Being primary source of online communication in the 80’s, its influence spread across Europe and Canada.

The first B2C (Business to Consumer) platform was introduced through Tesco PLC, one of the leading British grocery stores to date. The first online shopper, Mrs.Snowball, was claimed to have revolutionised a new-era of commerce.

This technology was kickstarted across the world by Michael Aldrich, who was able to to take an everyday TV and turn it into a computing terminal. This B2C platfrom allowed a personal focus on the company’s customers, ideas very similar to the platforms like Shopify and Squarespace present to today’s market.

This Is Local London:  Modern online e-commerce giants

Today, not only do we have platforms, but the ease of access to consumer is paramount. Mobile-commerce is starting to take over the market, with upto 22% of all transcations estimated to be done via m-commerce by 2023. User-to-User platforms, with likeness to Facebook Marketplace, have monoplised the second-hand online market.

Effectively, we can say that in today’s world, all this online phenomenon around us is credit to a bag of weed, the stem to the largest market in the world.