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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Just to play devil's advocate, what was the first online store? I think Amazon was pretty damn close, having started in 1994 as a store that simply stocked a large selection of rare books. The shipping took weeks as I recall.

It was not an obvious idea at the time, simply because there weren't that many people on the web. It was around the time that SSL was being developed [1] -- so if you were much earlier you probably couldn't take payments securely.

There were probably mail order catalogs that had websites, but I think that is a different thing than a "web store".

Also, Netflix wasn't the first online movie portal, but I'm pretty sure they were the first people to make a business out of mailing DVDs! It's crazy that they started like that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1...

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> I think Amazon was pretty damn close, having started in 1994 as a store that simply stocked a large selection of rare books. The shipping took weeks as I recall.

Afaik, they didn't really carry any stock when they first started. They were re-selling mail order books.

A while back there was a documentary about Amazon's early years. The part that everyone always quotes is the thing about using doors as desks. (Which struck me as silly, doors are expensive compared to many large, flat surfaces.) Anyway, the part that really stuck with me was that they had one favorite mail-order place, except that shop had a ten book minimum order. So Amazon would order the one book someone wanted and then nine copies of some obscure book about snails that was never in stock.

Yup I think I saw that same video on YouTube. They didn't have stock, so they were sort of like a meta-retailer. They presented an illusion of large selection.

I think the value was the interface and ease of searching, and not inventory and retail operations.

Vaguely pertinent, but ViaWeb was founded in 1995 by pg (and others). Amazon was apparently founded in 1994, but wasn't called Amazon until 1995 -- or, at least based on my cursory skim of Wikipedia.

So, I don't know that it was the first or not, but Bezos was certainly not the only one thinking about it at the time.

CD Now beat Amazon by a few months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDNow

But you're right, Amazon was basically there at the beginning of online retail. A better example is YouTube. Many online video sharing sites had started and died years before YouTube was a gleam in Janet Jackson's pasty http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-10-11-youtube-...

I think YouTube hit the right combination of UI and network speed improvements. Before that, either the UI was glitchy or the average person's network speed was too slow to stream video usefully.

Also, I believe the only way to deliver that content to a wide variety of browsers at the time was Flash. In fact Adobe/Macromedia may have only added the video functionality in the prior 5 years or so, so before that I think you couldn't even do it without making people install a plugin.

Remember this was well before Chrome came out, and Firefox was still nascent. So a lot of people were using IE.

I think Flash was already starting to fall out of fashion by then, but they realized there was a valuable technology deployed in it (video codecs).

Both true, Amazon was one of the first web stores, Netflix was one of the first movie portals. And similarly, the ipod and iphones weren't the first music players or smart phones but the first ones that worked really well. Remember how you could chose between 20 different mp3 players, all quite cheap but usually in crappy quality and without a music store? Remember how you could buy several smart phones like an Ericsson with a stylus or a BlackBerry with a keyboard?

Doing it right matters more than doing it first.

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