e-Retailing will save us from a recession, too bad it’s just a fad!

March 24th, 2008 by Kelly Rusk

Shopping online Apparently, in 2008, the best place to be during a looming recession is in the online retail industry.

In fact, all signs point to this trend, including Sitebrand’s CEO who is on the front page of the Ottawa Business Journal today.

It’s pretty incredible that online retailing has the potential to save the economy. Especially when it was just a crazy pipe dream less than 15 years ago. I dug up this piece of gold from Newsweek, dated 1995. The whole article is a great read, but let me draw your attention to a few gems:

“I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.”

And my favorite paragraph:

“Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.”

Now we can laugh at how wrong poor Clifford Stoll was, but the truth was at the time we were so far away from where we are now that his point of view was likely seen by a lot of people to counteract the enormous hype surrounding that new cool thing called the Internet. Think about the hype du jour — there are many opinions, and they definitely won’t all be right. Let’s see what happens in another 15 years…

PS- Still don’t believe people are skimming and scanning when they read online? Check out the comments section and notice how many people missed the article date, thinking it was current!

Posted in Kelly Rusk, eCommerce |

2 Responses

Colin Temple » Web Bubble Burst 2.0? Says:

March 24th, 2008 at 7:29 pm

[...] but what about those using the Web to sell something tangible? My friends over at Sitebrand paint a brighter picture for those involved in online retail, where the Web may actually be the safer bet as the U.S. [...]

LarryE Says:

March 25th, 2008 at 4:27 am

In 1993 my son and I created a web design and development company. He had the vision and I had the pocketbook, but both of us believed in the technology. Many of the people that we dragged kicking and screaming into the world of internet marketing are now leaders in their fields when it comes to sales from the ‘net.

We sold our company a few years ago, but continue to dabble for fun. I can remember when the web reached it’s first billion in sales volume, after about 5 years. Now, it is how many billions of dollars will the Internet increase sales volume annually.

The potential is still there and growing! You better believe or be left in the dust like many industries have been.