The notion did not take off in this part of the world immediately and it wasn’t until November 2007 that Cyber Monday got its first mention in this newspaper.īlack Friday came after that, at least in this part of the world, although it has a much longer – if more confused – back story.
All it did was issue a press release which said that while “traditional retailers will be monitoring store traffic and sales on Black Friday, online retailers have set their sights on something different: Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, which is quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.” The reason that Monday was such a big shopping day was because it was the day Americans returned to work and could use the better internet access of their offices to make their purchases. It was brought to life in 2005 by a US website called, a business which – almost certainly – had no idea it was inventing anything of note at the time. A year later eBay came to the party by which time big enterprises were falling over themselves to have an online presence.įast forward a decade and side-stepping all manner of online innovations and bubbles to the invention of Cyber Monday. The Irish Times also went online that year. Within weeks of the first transaction, the bookshop in Galway was taking its first tentative steps online after which it was joined by a small Seattle-based start-up called Amazon – the first book that site sold was the snappily titled Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter.
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“The team of young cyberspace entrepreneurs celebrated what was apparently the first retail transaction on the internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy,” said the New York Times at the time. And what was the first thing to be sold on the new platform? Ten Summoner’s Tales by Sting. It was heralded as “the equivalent of a shopping mall in cyberspace” and promised digitally secure transactions. At around the same time, a 21-year-old called Daniel M Kohn set up an online marketplace he christened NetMarket. The Netscape move wasn’t the only game-changer of 1994. The criminals, of course, worked out other ways to part us from our cash. That meant people were able to shop online with credit cards without falling victim to criminals. The breakthrough Netscape made was a system which made it almost impossible for information sent over the internet to be intercepted. It might not sound earth-shattering but without it, ecommerce as we know it would most likely not exist. It used a Videotex terminal machine accessed through telephone lines and through the 1980s and early 1990s connected millions of users to a computing network but its success was short-lived and was seen off by Tim Berners-Lee’s far more accessible world wide web, invented as the 1990s dawned.īy 1994, the ecommerce snowball was rolling down the hill in earnest, helped by a company called Netscape which had developed an encryption-based internet security protocol called SSL – or Secure Sockets Layer. The French Minitel system leapt on the idea with alacrity. No one could possibly have imagined that, in fewer than 40 years, global ecommerce would be worth more than $4 trillion each year, a number which is growing fast. It was a pretty humble start and viewed as a social service which might be used by older people or people without the means to get to shops. After she placed her order with the Videotex people, it was phoned in to the shop after which her breakfast of champions was delivered to her home. It took five years before the first transaction was completed by a 72-year-old grandmother called Jane Snowball from Gateshead who used her television remote control to order margarine, cornflakes and eggs from her local Tesco. He developed the earliest ecommerce platform in 1979 using a system that allowed people to communicate with retailers through their televisions with a thing called Videotex. We have an English inventor by the name of Michael Aldrich to thank for online shopping or at least for starting the ball rolling. Some retailers have been celebrating Black Friday for a whole month.
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Some Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales start on a Saturday while other Black Friday events – that is what we are told we should call such things – go on for a full week before and a full week after the Friday billed as black. Black Friday (which didn’t even exist in Ireland a decade ago) has now become virtually indistinguishable from Cyber Monday (which didn’t even exist anywhere 15 years ago).