Aug 11 2014

It was twenty years ago today…

On 11 August 1994, exactly 20 years ago, someone paid $12.48 plus shipping for Sting’s CD, Ten Summoner’s Tales, in the process making what is now recognised as the world’s first ‘secure online purchase’. (Although the first recorded act of ecommerce was apparently a cannabis sale arranged between two US students in 1971 over the ARPANET, a precursor of what was to become the global internet.)

To put it mildly, those early ecommerce stores were incredibly rudimentary compared to today’s sophisticated versions – commercial activity on the internet was technically forbidden in the US (and would remain so until spring 1995), while potential users not only had to download a special programme to encrypt their payment details, they also needed both a high level of technological proficiency and a computer running the Unix operating system.

To say things have moved on since then would be something of an understatement. Research commissioned by Shop Direct (the owners of Littlewoods and Very) to mark the anniversary suggests that today 95% of us in the UK shop online, with around a quarter of us doing it every week. And after we spent £91 billion online between us last year, 2014 is expected to see sales crash through the £100 billion mark.

While we may not trade on the scale of Amazon and their ilk, we at Davpack have played our own not insignificant part in the rise of home shopping. In the late 1990s, we became the first company in the UK to offer a full range of packaging supplies and products online and have consistently led the way in terms of pricing, speed of delivery and levels of service ever since.

We have also, of course, supplied many of our fellow trailblazers with the means to get their own products safely to their customers. With one of the most comprehensive ranges of postal packaging, together with what is almost certainly the biggest choice of in-stock cardboard boxes available in the UK, every day thousands of parcels containing products ordered online are delivered to homes and businesses in Davpack packaging.

As ecommerce officially enters its third decade, you can be sure that Davpack will continue to be at the forefront, offering the simplest, fastest and most cost effective online shopping experience and supplying the very best postal boxes, mailing bags, book wraps and protective packaging to other mail order businesses.

Here’s to the next twenty years!