The History Of Ecommerce – Our History

Our First Go At Ecommerce

When we first decided to start selling online, it was for fun not necessarily for profit. So began my first go at Ecommerce. It was early 1999 and of course everyone was talking about Ebay, it was all about “the community” and was supposed to be pretty easy to do and yes FUN. In fact I already had experience writing web pages in HTML and it was straightforward and easy. When sales started to come in, my wife got interested as well. Like most selling on Ebay back then it was mostly “stuff” we had and wanted to get rid of or picked up at local garage sales, estate sales and what have you.

Ecommerce for Fun!

Expanding Our Online Selling

Over the next few years we had sold quite a lot and learned a lot. We developed a system for just about everything. Finding things to sell, taking high quality photos, listing our things to sell on the website and shipping the “stuff” to the buyers. It was still fun. Then we decided to ramp up our online selling a bit. For keeping track of what we were selling and how much we were making I wrote software for a Microsoft Windows program. It included what we had paid for each item, how much it sold for, and the cost of selling and shipping the item. Our sales volume was high enough that I wrote into our software a system for keeping track of items in our warehouse. If I do say so myself the software I wrote was much easier to use that the Ebay website accounting pages.

Ecommerce for Profit!

Ebay Changes And It Is Not So Good

Then one day Ebay went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Things changed constantly and the feeling of “community” began to fade away as the stock holders profit became more important than our “fun and profit”. Ebay changes were getting many sellers frustrated and sometimes angry. So we started to consider what other Ecommerce options we had.

Basically it looked like we could either get onto another website with thousands of other sellers, or start our own Ecommerce website. As it turned out, we did both. Although we did not run away from where we started we did start to branch out. Next time I post I will talk about the other online selling venues we tried and our own Ecommerce website.

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