Latest tech trends reveal the evolution of buying and selling in the modern marketplace
By: John Lietsch, Bloo Kanoo
The emergence of e-commerce in the ’90s and its subsequent meteoric rise had many people believing if not predicting that physical retail (“brick and mortar”) had met its demise. The introduction of the World Wide Web in 1991, the launch of web browsers shortly thereafter and the start of a little, no-name online bookseller named Amazon in 1995, all painted a bleak picture for the future of the in-person shopping experience (now known as IRL or “In Real Life”).
Fast forward just 30 quick years, and that no-name bookseller now accounts for nearly 40% of all online sales in the United States, while the internet, with its many tributaries such as e-commerce, social media, and livestreaming to name a few, is dominating the conversation.
Ironically, “e-commerce” still accounts for less than 20% of total global retail sales—even after all the predictions of supremacy, the forecasted demise of physical retail, and the “apparent” massive and irreversible shift of commerce to the web because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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