In 1995 a software programmer by the name of Pierre Omidyar started putting together a web site that he called AuctionWeb. The concept was simple, Omidyar wanted to use the internet to find and connect people who wanted to bid on each other's used items. Looking around his garage for something to post, Omidyar settled on a broken laser pointer. Within a day, it had sold for $14.83. Just to clarify, Omidyar e-mailed the buyer to make sure the purchaser knew it was broken, and received a fortuitous response: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers". Thus, the first purchase was established on what we now know as eBay(EBAY  ), ushering in a new world of commerce.

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Over in Seattle at roughly the same time in 1995, Jeff Bezos boxed up the first book ever sold on Amazon.com(AMZN  ), then under the name of Cadabra. In just the first 30 days of operation, Bezos sold books to online shoppers in all 50 U.S. states and 45 countries, all from his Seattle garage. Growing into the self-proclaimed title as "Earth's largest bookstore", Bezos had stumbled upon the template for e-commerce with books, which were cheap to ship and easy to order directly from publishers. Furthermore, publishers had already created vast digital archives of their titles on CD-ROM, something that could be uploaded to a Web site. The ease with which the format of books was transferable to an online marketplace soon spurred demand for a replication of the standard to satisfy other demands. Soon, Amazon soon started selling everything from music CD's, software, tools, toys, sporting goods and even groceries.  

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E-commerce's history is short but fascinating and has been intricately tied to the development of technology over the past few decades. The rates at which networking and computing have improved and transformed has allowed personal computers to be linked to a global information network that has led to the amalgamation of the largest collection of consumers ever. The key components of technology that allowed for the rise of eBay and Amazon as we know it came in 1994 and 1995 when the technology was developed for third-party services to use in processing online credit card sales. In 1995, a company called Verisign began developing digital IDs that allowed for the verification of the identity of online businesses. This technology allowed Verisign to eventually develop technology that focused on certifying that a Web site's e-commerce servers were properly encrypted and secure. These technologies set the stage for the future of eCommerce, a future in which you didn't have to be a web entrepreneur or an existing business to operate an online store.

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With the expansion of Amazon into sales venues beyond books, eBay leveled the playing field by opening up the world of eCommerce to anyone who had anything they wanted to sell. Encouraging users to raid their attic and post a listing, eBay demonstrated that by the power of the internet in finding someone somewhere who would want to buy another's user's junk, even a broken laser pointer. In 1996, with two full-time employees, eBay sold $7.2 million worth of goods. By 1997, with the help of a Beanie Babies frenzy, eBay sold $95 million in goods. In 2007, eBay sold $52.5 billion in auctions, had more than 220 million registered users and 13,000 employees

The course that the industry of eCommerce has taken since then has been interesting as a reflection of the changing world of commerce in addition to fascinating in its own right. Following along as online shopping developed into a norm, I will visit the companies that were able to grow with the times as well as those that fizzled out as competition developed during the growth and expansion of e-commerce