The IT Nerd

This Sunday, on August 11^th, the world celebrates the 25^th anniversary of e-commerce. An invention that changed everything: the way we shop, travel, communicate and conduct business. And the people at PayPal have gathered a list of key milestones:

1. 1994 – Dan Kohn, a 21-year-old entrepreneur makes the first online transaction.  On August 11, 1994, Kohn sold a CD of Sting’s “Ten Summoner’s Tales” to a friend, who used a credit card to spend $12.48, plus shipping costs. That transaction was the first to be protected by encryption technology.
2. 1995 – eBay was born, first as the ‘AuctionWeb’. Its creator Pierre Omidyar wanted to create an online marketplace, and he reportedly wrote the first code for it in one weekend.
3. 1998 – PayPal launches as a secure online payment system.
4. 2004 – Blockbuster Video were the first official online film and video game subscription service. Despite their demise, they developed a simple subscription model framework that is still used today by Netflix and Amazon Prime.
5. 2004 – Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce company supporting online retailers,  launches a Canadian online store selling snowboards. Today Shopify reports it had more than 800,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries using its platform, with total gross merchandise volume exceeding $41.1 billion for calendar 2018.
6. 2006 – Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald bartered his way from a single red paperclip to a house in a series of fourteen online trades over the course of a year.
7. 2006 – The most expensive thing purchased via e-commerce (eBay) is a $168 million, 405-feet-long Gigayacht designed by naval architect Frank Mulder for Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.
8. 2009 – Crypto currency, Bitcoin, launched on Jan 3^rd.
9. 2011 – Canadian heartbreaker Justin Bieber’s hair is sold on eBay by Ellen DeGeneres for $40,668.
10. 2013 – KISS rocker Gene Simmons gum sells for almost $250,000.
11. 2017 – 50% of online businesses launched within the last two years owned by women.
12. 2017 – Cyber Monday sales exceed $6.5B. 
13. 2017 – While four out of five Canadians shop online, less than one in five (17 per cent) of Canadian SMEs businesses are using online payment tools such as electronic invoicing, online marketplaces, or e-commerce-enabled websites.
14. 2018 – PayPal surpasses 250 million active accounts worldwide.
15. 2018 – 87% of Canadians made an online purchase in 2018 (46% on mobile).

It will be interesting to see what the next 25 years has in store for us.

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