When the shops came to us
Bringing convenience to selling and buying, it turns out cyberspace is full of shopkeepers
Being a consumer–based society, one of the most profound ways to change the way we live is in how we shop. For the entire 20th century, ‘mail order’ meant poring over catalogues of magazine ads, then posting a coupon (or, later, phoning) to receive your goods ‘within 28 days’. In 1995, both Amazon and eBay began, and now we take the joy of instant browsing and next–day delivery for granted.
Technology provided both the medium for this rapid innovation and the means to build it. Jeff Bezos’ first start-up idea was based on the fax machine, but it was the growth of the World Wide Web, conceived by Tim Berners–Lee on Steve Jobs’ Next hardware, that convinced Bezos to chuck in his Wall Street job and to focus on selling online, beginning the incredible journey of a little e– commerce site called Amazon.
For eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, a computer science degree led to coding on the Mac and then the web, where the hobbyist ‘Echo Bay Auction Web’ page ended up making him a billionaire. With its simple process and buyer/seller ratings, eBay paved the way for peer–to–peer trading sites like Etsy, which since 2005 has helped makers sell their creations to audiences they could never have found before. It’s now almost a $7bn business, compared to eBay’s $30bn and Amazon’s $800bn. The next e– commerce unicorn might lurk in niche services like Depop, where fashionistas trade unwanted pieces.
Unexpected items
For better or worse, Amazon’s huge semi–automated warehouses have disrupted work as well as shopping. The UK’s Ocado, founded in 2000, introduced a similar approach to groceries, and now the likes of Grubhub, created to link takeaway restaurants to customers, are building their own food factories to centralize and streamline production.
Most supermarket deliveries are still packed by staff in stores, where shopping in person remains the default. But their self–service checkout counters and barcode–scanning ‘shop and go’ terminals reflect changes on the high street. Apple Stores let you pay for many items using an app on your iPhone, and walk out without having to interact with staff. In 2018, Amazon Go stores opened in a handful of US cities, using multiple technologies to detect bagging and charge cell phone users automatically. The company is reportedly scouting UK sites in the hope of future expansion.