In 1979, long before the advent of the World Wide Web (1990), Margaret Thatcher’s IT advisor, Michael Aldrich, invented online shopping by connecting a modified domestic TV to a real-time transaction processing computer via a domestic telephone line. E-Commerce had arrived and Thompsons Holidays B2B (1981) and Tesco B2C (1984) gave the internet new avenues of commercial power.
Fast forward three decades to the year of the London Olympics and the proportion of online retail sales excluding automotive fuel is 8.5 per cent; Deloitte highlighted how the boundaries between physical and virtual space are becoming blurred with four in ten shops predicted to close in five years (Deloitte 2012); collection of Amazon parcells from The Co-operative stores is a reality with Waitrose to follow the same model.
In the UK, independent traders selling through online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon were turning over £10bn or close to £1 for every £70 spent online. Then there are the 4% of UK customers who bought stuff through Facebook according to a TNS survey.
Meanwhile there are predictions that one in four (25%) people will regularly use interactive TV to shop by the end of 2014.
These are new types of retailing business and management across British retailing has to be very aware of the power of the internet.
Thank you Michael Aldrich.
Thanks for the image go to http://entrance-exam.net/
One of the largest developments in retail will be the use of mobile wallets. A virtual (but very real) wad of money in your pocket that will allow you to purchase virtually and in the "real" world. It will be interesting to see the effects on society when mobile wallets are eventually adopted widescale.
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