The history of electronic commerce, 30 years after its origin

The origin of e-commerce It takes us back to February 16, 1994. That precise day, the gastronomic chain Pizza Hut fired the starting signal for a business that, in 2024, is essential for any company seeking growth. According to Statista data, last year global e-commerce recorded revenues of more than $5.7 billion. And it is expected that in 2027 that figure will exceed 8,000 million annually.

In addition to the pizza chain, in the history of e-commerce there is another unexpected protagonist. Did you know that the first sale to be made through the Web involved the British artist Sting? Although not everyone knows it, giants in the sector such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba were preceded by circular masses and a musical album.

The history of e-commerce: 30 years ago, Pizza Hut opened the first online store

The story takes us to 1994, in Santa Cruz, a Californian city about 115 kilometers south of San Francisco. On February 16 of that year, the restaurant chain Pizza Hut inaugurated PizzaNet. That is a milestone in the history of electronic commerce. It was not a classic ribbon cutting in a street store, but rather the first website that allowed online shopping.

The site’s interface was extremely simple, although anticipatory and therefore commendable. A welcome text, access to the product menu – in this case, pizzas and drinks -, a form for the customer to indicate their information and a button to confirm the order. According to the chronicles, that was an experiment for which it began to take shape shortly after. Shopping from home, without even dialing a phone number, so that the product reaches the consumers’ doorstep.

An interesting detail: in 1994, when Pizza Hut began the history of e-commerce, the number of Internet users in the world was around 20 million. Now, we are on our way to 5.5 billion, according to statistics from We Are Social in its most recent report Digital Report 2024. The truth is that PizzaNet transcended the and-commerce. At that time, following the site The History of the Web“browsers barely supported images (…) and the Web had just transcended the academic world.”

How did PizzaNet, the pioneering site in the history of electronic commerce, work?

As we pointed out, the founding stone of e-commerce He settled in a Californian city. The geography of this innovation is not surprising, knowing the technological push in that American region, home of industry giants such as Apple, Meta, Google and Netflix, to name a few.

However, customer information did not remain in Santa Cruz. The data from the forms traveled more than 400 kilometers to Wichita, Kansas, to a centralized server of the gastronomic chain. Once an order is received, a human agent called the provided phone number to verify the request and make sure it was not a joke. At this point, it is worth remembering that the site did not have the functions that would later arrive, to make online payment. Thus, the customer paid when they received the pizza.

As the restaurant chain stated in a 2013 tweet, the first product purchased in the history of e-commerce was a pizza. However, some question that assertion. So what was the first thing to be sold over the Web? By exploring this question, the chords of Ten Summoner’s Tales.

The controversy surrounding the first product that was sold online and the prominence of Sting

Without a doubt, PizzaNet by Pizza Hut has a prominent place in the history of e-commerce. But the relevance of that platform also has nuances. On the one hand, as we noted, the one that began on February 16, 1994 was a pilot test. On the other hand, it was restricted to customers in Santa Cruz, California. In August of that year, Los Angeles Times He described that move as “a half-baked experiment”. Ingenious, when it comes to pizzas.

From the prism of 2024, the chronicle seems prehistoric. “The nation’s largest pizza delivery service just launched PizzaNet online. Why call or fax your order with extra cheese, half mushrooms and half pepperoni with onion (…) when you can order it virtually over the Internet. Is the way geek and chic to eat,” the American media wrote 30 years ago.

Was a pizza the first product to be transacted over the Web? A report published in The New York Times In August of that same year he pointed in another direction. Graduated Attention buyers: Internet is open, the report enthroned another king in the history of e-commerce. As they stated, The first Internet sale was that of a Sting album titled Ten Summoner’s Tales.

According to the aforementioned source, a buyer in Philadelphia, United States, paid $12.48 by credit card for the album, the Briton’s fourth studio album in his solo career. Thus, it is possible that this musical work displaces pizzas from its privileged space in the e-commerce.

In any case, it is interesting and curious to remember that that food of Italian origin was the protagonist of another milestone in digital transactions: it was the first thing that was purchased with Bitcoins, as we previously reported in Hypertextual when reviewing the future of that cryptocurrency.