: One of the first known Web purchases took place in 1994. It
was a pepperoni pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese from Pizza Hut, a
somewhat appropriate purchase for the early days of the Internet. When Amazon
came on the scene not long after, selling books online was a curious idea.
After all, why would people buy a textbook online when they could go to a
bookstore? But eventually, a revolutionary change in culture and groupthink
took place. Buying things online was all about price and selection, says Ellen
Davis, a vice president with the National Retail Federation. If you lived in a
small town with just one bookstore and they didn't stock the novel you wanted,
the Internet was a solution. The big sellers were "hard goods," those
things you didn't have to touch, feel or smell in order to buy, such as books,
computers and other electronics. Now, nothing is off limits. "As the
Internet has evolved, it's become a channel where you can buy anything,"
Davis says. "You can buy fragrances — something you would have normally
thought you would need to go to a store and actually experience before you
decided to buy."
