History of E-commerce

In episode 8, we will pivot from the first 25 years to the next 25 years of e-commerce. We will discuss challenges to the credibility of content (e.g. fake reviews), and highlight several fundamental tensions – the tension between the benefits of curation and the risks of personalization, the tension between being watched and ignored in privacy, the tension between the convenience of fast delivery and cost to the environment, and the tension between efficiency in shopping and doing away of human interactions. All of these questions must be wrestled with in order to safeguard and elevate trust and trustworthiness in e-commerce in the future.

You’ll hear from Vint Cerf (Chief Internet Evangelist at Google; one of the founding fathers of the Internet), Christine Varney (Former Federal Trade Commissioner), Tim O’Reilly (Founder of O’Reilly Media), Pierre Poignant (Co-Founder and CEO of Lazada), Sebastian Klauke (President of Otto Group in Germany), Amy Webb (Founder of the Future Today Institute), Jonathan Nelson (CEO of Organic), Chris Maguire (Cofounder of Etsy), Bob Glushko (XML pioneer; Professor at UC Berkeley), Jane Winn (Professor at University of Washington School of Law), Don MacKenzie (Professor, Sustainable Transportation Lab at University of Washington), and Rachel Botsman (researcher on trust).

On this episode, we’ll continue our world tour with stops in Kazakhstan, China, Russia, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia.  While trust remains at the heart of e-commerce wherever it’s taking place, we see that trustworthiness takes different forms based upon variations in infrastructure. We’ll also continue to see that e-commerce has not only transformed the experience of the largest companies in the biggest cities, but also of the rural farmer in a tiny far-flung town.

You’ll hear from Pierre Poignant (CEO of Lazada), Kalyan Krishnamurthy (CEO of Flipkart), Sacha Poignonnec (CEO of Jumia), Ilya Shirokov (CEO of Joom), Chen Long (Former Chief Streategy Officer of Ant Financial; Director of Luohan Academy at Alibaba Group), and Alexios Shaw (Former GM of Lamoda).

The common thread that pulls through e-commerce stories around the world is the focus on connectivity, security, community, and ultimately trust. And trust in e-commerce is not inevitable. Policymakers, business leaders, and technologists around the world have made intentional decisions to make the e-commerce infrastructure trustworthy. E-commerce is enabled by the coming together of payments, logistics, and communications systems, a massive project undertaken by both private and public sector actors. 

You’ll hear from leaders of some of the largest e-commerce companies: Susan Segal (Board member of Mercado Libre), Kalyan Krishnamurthy (CEO of Flipkart), Pierre Poignant (CEO of Lazada), Sacha Poignonnec (CEO, Jumia), Tan Tin Wee (Chief Executive of Singapore's National Supercomputing Centre; Internet Hall of Fame 2012), Geoff Huston (Chief Scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, Australia; Internet Hall of Fame 2012), and Chen Long (Former Chief Streategy Officer of Ant Financial; Director of Luohan Academy at Alibaba Group).

For the first time in history, granular personalization of products and services can take place at scale, enabling people to get exactly what they want. This episode is about the innovations that made it possible for stores to know and anticipate what we want.

You’ll hear from Jenny Fleiss (Cofounder of Rent the Runway and JetBlack), Amy Lauer (Senior VP at Sephora), Lou Montulli (Inventor of the Web Cookie), Scott Case (Founding CTO of Priceline), Thomas Parkinson (Cofounder of Peapod), Robert Chatwani (CMO at Atlassian), Matt Lawson (VP of ads marketing at Google), Jon Alferness (VP of growth & marketplace at Lyft), and Brian McCullough (Host of the Internet History podcast).

Another unique marker of e-commerce is what’s often called the long tail. This episode is about the rise of the niche and the unlimited selection, as a major development for consumers and small businesses.

You’ll hear from Kalyan Krishnamurthy (CEO of Flipkart), Ellen Siminoff (Founding executive of Yahoo! and former CEO of Efficient Frontier), Mark Britto (Former executive at Amazon and current executive at PayPal), Erik Brynjolfsson (Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Chris Maguire (Cofounder of Etsy), Haroon Mokhtarzada (cofounder of Webs.com), Ruslan Fazlyev (CEO of Ecwid), and Brian McCullough (Host of the Internet History podcast).

E-commerce enabled an unprecedented wave of bottom-up community-sourced information, which created a scalable decentralized trust mechanism.  This episode is about how we decide what’s worth our trust; a story of the word-of-mouth becoming the wisdom of the online crowds. You’ll hear from Guy Kawasaki (Former Chief Evangelist at Apple), Pierre Omidyar (Founder of eBay), Tim O’Reilly (Founder of O’Reilly Media), Baroness Onora O’Neill (House of Lords), Erik Brynjolfsson (Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Kevin O’Connor (Founder of DoubleClick), Benedict Evans (Partner at Andreessen Horowitz), Jim Morris (Former CTO of PowerReviews), and Jane Winn (Professor at University of Washington School of Law).

For hundreds of years, people had traveled to a bazaar, shops, or malls and offered a coin or piece of paper in exchange for goods and services. E-commerce involved a fundamentally different kind of engagement – via clicks and screens. The task before the early e-commerce companies, then, was essentially to transition people from physical to digital forms of storefronts, aisles, shopping carts, checkouts, and more. You'll hear the story from Mitchell Baker (Chairwoman of Mozilla), Paul English (Founder of Kayak.com), Alan Lacy (Former CEO of Sears), Lou Montulli (Inventor of the web cookie), Phil Zimmermann (Creator of PGP Encryption), Thomas Parkinson (Cofounder of Peapod), Larry Landweber (Founder of CSNET), and Scott Eckert (Former Head of E-commerce at Dell). 

The story of e-commerce begins at a particular moment in history. This episode will tell the story of why the mid-90s was the right moment for e-commerce to catch the spark. You'll hear from Steve Case (Founder of AOL), Jim Barksdale (CEO of Netscape), Kim Polese (original PM of Java), Mark Walsh (VP of CUC International), Fred Smith (CEO of FedEx), Ira Magaziner (former Senior Policy Advisor to President Clinton), and Terry Jones (founder of Travelocity).