The Internet was first commercialized in 1991 and with that began the first bouts of online shopping with Amazon and eBay leading the way in the industry. Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos sold mostly books at the time while eBay was the first C2C platform for shoppers started by Pierre Omidyar. An online payment system called PayPal would sprout out in 1998, which became compulsory for all eBay users. Back then, paying by cash on delivery was more commonplace and in Malaysia, so eBay & Lelong took the country by storm.
It was a new industry, so the online shopping scene really started out with many things needing explanations as both sellers and consumers alike didn’t necessarily know what they had to do or what equipment they needed to utilize online shopping. As pages & websites weren’t so widely familiar then, people would use services like Internet Shopping Network, essentially a virtual shopping mall, not unlike websites of today which used product images & descriptions to appeal to consumers. At that point in 2000, tracking for e-commerce sales began and due to its convenience as according to reports, sales had hit &5.3 billion in the last quarter of 1999. By 2007, the number of online users buying & researching products had doubled.
So what did the people at the time think of it all? From the start, many realized the shopping revolution that was coming and what is now known as e-commerce. It was the start of cheaper, more convenient and more customizable options in products for consumers as opposed to the traditional way of brick & mortar stores. Some dissatisfaction that arose were from retailers who were unhappy that online shopping forced margins down.
Though with the opening of a new era, comes its concerns and one of them was definitely online information security. The fear of fraud and hackers were real and for parents, the thought of children being exposed to online porn was a concern. Assumptions that advertising would overtake and exploit cyberspace, was also an assumption that grew from this exploding trend. Advertisers at the time were just as new and it was the start of new strategies on how to get eyeballs on their ads.