VIDEO: Online Shopping Fails

Shopping online is risky. It’s kind of a gamble if you think about it, as you can never know how what you see on a website looks in reality or how it would fit you.

This video brings together the funniest online shopping fails. Enjoy!

Also, here is some information on the history of online shopping, provided by Wikipedia.

The growth of the internet as a secure shopping channel has developed since 1994, with the first sales of Sting album ‘Ten Summoner’s Tales’. Wine, chocolates and flowers soon followed and were among the pioneering retail categories which fueled the growth of online shopping. Researchers found that having products that are appropriate for e-commerce was a key indicator of Internet success.

Many of these products did well as they are generic products which shoppers didn’t need to touch and feel in order to buy. But also importantly in the early days there were few shoppers online and they were from a narrow segment: affluent, male, 30+.

As the revenues from online sales continued to grow significantly researchers identified different types of online shoppers, Rohm & Swaninathan identified four categories and named them “convenience shoppers, variety seekers, balanced buyers, and store-oriented shoppers”.

They focused on shopping motivations and found that the variety of products available and the perceived convenience of the buying online experience were significant motivating factors.

English entrepreneur Michael Aldrich was a pioneer of online shopping in 1979. His system connected a modified domestic TV to a real-time transaction processing computer via a domestic telephone line. He believed that videotex, the modified domestic TV technology with a simple menu-driven human–computer interface, was a ‘new, universally applicable, participative communication medium — the first since the invention of the telephone.’

This enabled ‘closed’ corporate information systems to be opened to ‘outside’ correspondents not just for transaction processing but also for e-messaging and information retrieval and dissemination, later known as e-business.

His definition of the new mass communications medium as ‘participative’ was fundamentally different from the traditional definitions of mass communication and mass media and a precursor to the social networking on the Internet 25 years later.

In March 1980 he launched Redifon’s Office Revolution, which allowed consumers, customers, agents, distributors, suppliers and service companies to be connected on-line to the corporate systems and allow business transactions to be completed electronically in real-time.

During the 1980s he designed, manufactured, sold, installed, maintained and supported many online shopping systems, using videotex technology.

The first World Wide Web server and browser, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, opened for commercial use in 1991. Thereafter, subsequent technological innovations emerged in 1994: online banking, the opening of an online pizza shop by Pizza Hut, Netscape’s SSL v2 encryption standard for secure data transfer, and Intershop’s first online shopping system.

The first secure retail transaction over the Web was either by NetMarket or Internet Shopping Network in 1994. Immediately after, Amazon.com launched its online shopping site in 1995 and eBay was also introduced in 1995. Alibaba’s sites Taobao and Tmall were launched in 2003 and 2008, respectively.

Retailers are increasingly selling goods and services prior to availability through “pretail” for testing, building, and managing demand.