One big difference between the Gold Rush in California in the mid 1800s and the Dot Com Rush 150 years later is that while prospectors in the former went about looking for gold, ignoring fool’s gold, there were a lot of prospectors in the Dot Com one looking exclusively for fool’s gold. The more fools with more gold the merrier!

It was hard being in the Silicon Valley in the late 1990s without being caught up in the big technology bubble. Of course it was not a bubble back then; it was the Dot Com boom! Any remotely plausible idea had a hundred investors rushing to spend money on it. Everything was going to be new technology. Brick and mortar companies were out! The internet was in! Everything would happen online. We even had a few enterprising online grocers set up shop back then. eCommerce was the big buzz word. I myself was caught up with the fever and the craze of the time.

George, a friend of mine, happened to come across someone who had the good fortune of being named Eno Compton. When Eno, who had a small business, was thinking about a web site for his company, he decided he’d slice and dice his first and last name. His second piece of good fortune was picking the right 4 letters: ecom.com (e from Eno and com from ‘Com’pton.). Of course he did this before the big technology boom, and indeed before eCommerce even became a term in common usage. Therefore, when the boom did happen, he realized he was sitting on some real primo, top-grade cyberspace.

Unfortunately, Eno was not quite sure what to do with ecom.com, so he asked my friend for help in coming up with some ideas for revamping his site to make money. After going over it with Eno for a while, my friend George suggested that he’d put together a team to help work on something for the site, and maybe we could all form a joint company. He then approached me, and I was astounded by the fact that he knew someone who had ecom.com! Remember I lived in the Silicon Valley back then; everything was dot com, and if you had some easy name.com, why, that was better than gold! I then pulled in a couple of other friends and together we started brainstorming. Starting with a web site, how do you come up with a whole business model? There are times when you are thinking out of the box and others when you are just thinking ass backwards, I leave you to judge which category our thoughts and ideas fell under.

We finally got back to Eno and told him we’d offer him some 20 or 30% (I forget which) for use of his web site. We had a few small details to take care of, like a detailed business plan. We were still arguing between b2b and b2c sites or an open retail portal where anyone could buy anything. It did not matter; the important thing was we felt sure we were sitting on a gold mine! Thankfully Eno, and this might also have to do with the fact that he was not from the Silicon Valley, had more business sense then all of us put together. After hearing out our long explanation about valuations and business models, and potentials and everything else we could come up with on PPTs, he said, “OK, but what exactly are you going to do?” This stumped us a bit — it did not matter what we did, didn’t he see that? We were on ecom.com! It does not matter what you do with it, you are bound to make millions! Eno, realizing he might be communicating with some delusionals, firmly refused to let go of the web site or the url till there was something firmly in place that showed potential of making money. That was about the end of that. When we realized we had to come up with some way of making money we had way too many ideas and nothing any of us could agree on. Finally we realized, in our ‘infinite new-age tech wisdom’, that ecom.com was too generic! We needed to be specialized, at which point the group kind of dissolved into different sub-projects, some investigating b2b, others b2c or online retailing.

Since you have probably not heard my name in connection with any of the big dot com stories of the time you can safely assume that none of those ideas quite worked out, and you would be absolutely right. But I shared that little incident to illustrate how big and hyped up all this technology, internet and eCommerce was at one time. When we talk about boom and bust of course we mean financially. The technology itself has not gone up and down, but has steadily improved and, more importantly, has become easily accessible to everyone.

Whereas at one time setting up an eCommerce site or allowing the transfer of documents and money between your company’s vendors and suppliers would have cost upwards of a million dollars, now you have open source eCommerce solutions. Plug and play, just drop it into your web site, link it to your inventory database and you are up and running. All of it enabling even the smallest of companies and sites to sell just about anything they want to.

In the course of my blogs, I will be looking at the changes and trends in eCommerce over the years — where it was and where it is now — and I will share my opinion on where it might be headed. I plan to talk about open source solutions like ZenCart, osCommerce and other products, as well as present case studies of successful eCommerce companies, new ideas and innovations.

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