In 1996, the technology was good enough that you could see the future very clearly, but it still was very clunky from a consumer and enterprise point of view.

Credit card transactions were extremely difficult to execute and wildly insecure. If there was one tiny formatting error in your address, you would have to refill the entire form again (before the days of autocomplete).

Websites might takes three or four minutes to load. Often they wouldn't load at all, or components would be missing.

Often your home internet connection would just stop working for minutes or hours at a time for no reason.

However, you could see that things were moving in a certain direction, and stuff like Amazon made complete sense already (even if it didn't work that well for 95% of people).

During that time, the web was mostly brochure websites. No revenue was generated from these sites as they were purely informational.

"Web 2.0" was born during this time (maybe a little later) and introduced a paradigm shift where the Internet was becoming more commercial. It took some time for things like merchant accounts to run credit cards to become available for Internet usage, which was huge since fraud was a major consideration with Internet shopping. There was also none, or very few, SaaS eCommerce platforms like Shopify, so eCommerce was mostly a roll-your-own or use a new open source eCommerce platform that was in its infancy. It wasn't until the mid 2000s that popular self hosted platforms like OpenCart, Magento, PrestaShop, WooCommerc, etc, were available and mostly feature complete for most customers needs back then.

Fun fact, prior to March 1991 [0] it was considered bad form to advertise at all on the "internet".

If I recall correctly, this train of thought lasted somewhat into 1992 and then very quickly disappeared entirely.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_online_advertising

Can't speak for OP but, in '96 Netscape had just had a wildly successful IPO and talk of the Internet and World Wide Web was everywhere. It was kind-of obvious to anyone who paid attention where it was going, especially e-commerce, but, the technology wasn't quite there yet and a critical mass of users hadn't yet been reached.

Over the next 4-5 years, investors threw massive amounts of money at any company with ".com" in their name, regardless of whether they had a single customer. Companies who were offering little more than a single feature were raising VC funding.

It was a fun time to be in tech but the bubble bursting around 2000 was painful.