What was the first e-commerce site?
A while back, I was trying to research what the first web-based
application was (for a piece on putting Ruby on Rails in context of
previous web app development technology). Paul Graham
claims it was ViaWeb, but
Amazon.com (sometime in 1994) launched before ViaWeb. Maybe Graham means
first
end user application, but I think Amazon still counts because it
was a dynamicly built site that users could interact with.
In the end, I couldn't find much about what the first web application was.
Now there's a
thread on
Joel on Software of people trying to figure out the first website to
offer internet purchases (closely related topics, I'd say). Some other
contenders: CDNOW (1994, but could
you buy things?) and
NetMarket (1994, first encrypted credit card transaction).