Professor Kirkpatrick
English M01A
1 December 2014
Online Shopping Online shopping has drastically grown over the years and is now becoming more and more competitive with in store retailers. Online shopping has grown greatly and is becoming easier and easier to use as we become more technologically advanced through the years. Also as almost everyone needs to uses a mobile device or personal computer the easier it gets for people the more abundant online shopping becomes. The internet is changing the way American consumers shop for goods and services through online shopping. Online shopping has grown greatly throughout the years but it could not have been accomplished without the internet. The first site to take advantage of online shopping was Netscape. Netscape released Navigator browser in 1994 with a Secure Sockets Layer encryption for safe and secure transactions. (The history of online shopping instantshift.com) This allowed for Pizza Hut to start online ordering in 1994 which allowed them to have the first ever online purchase that was a Pizza Hut pizza.(first ever online purchase huffingtonpost.com) After that two major companies for online shopping’s history both came out in 1995 which were Amazon and eBay. The gross merchandise value of goods sold on eBay was $76.50 billion in 2013 while Amazon’s retail sales were estimated to be $67.86 billion in 2013. (amazon and ebay grow their b2b sales internetretailer.com) Online retail spending as a whole was about $40 billion and is said to grow as the number of computers, tablets and mobile phones increase. (emarketer.com total us retail stores top 4.5 trillion). Online shopping has grown greatly throughout the years for many different reasons. One of the main reasons that it has grown greatly is that it is so cost effective. Shopping online is also very good because there is a much larger variety of the product online then there is in store. You can also shop from the ease of your home