ecommerce and shopping carts

From: Andrew K. Bressen <akb+lists.cctech_at_imap1.mirror.to>
Date: Thu Oct 14 06:31:01 2004

I got contacted by an attorney looking for prior art
on ecommerce and shopping carts, especially web-based stuff;
a bunch of lawyers ended up with the OpenMarket patents
and is trying to shake everyone down, ala SCO. Amazon, among
others, are working on busting the patent.

The two early events I know of are:

June-July of '94 my company (Bibliobytes/HKS.net) released
"OrderBook", which was basically a front end that would let you enter
some SKU's and credit card info and would email us an encrypted copy
of the order to be processed and fufilled. You got the SKUs from a
catalog downloaded seperately from a web page, by ftp, or whatever.

Around August 2004, NetMarket, a startup done by four guys from
Swarthmore, started selling CDs over the web.

Anyone know of any other shopping-cart and/or automatic payment
systems that were up and running or publically described
before October of '94?

  --akb
Received on Thu Oct 14 2004 - 06:31:01 BST