In 2025, it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish a retail business that does not rely at some level on ecommerce fulfilment, and our third-party logistics services are designed to make implementing an online shopping service as easy as possible.

The development of ecommerce as it exists today, alongside the development of secure online purchasing platforms, helped to encourage the adoption of online shopping outside of businesses and amongst early adopters of online technology.

However, whilst the likes of Book Stacks Unlimited, Amazon, and eBay helped to pioneer and develop the ecommerce world that we know today, they were far from the first online shopping systems available. They were not even the first major attempt to sell products from major retailers online.

Whilst not a success, the first electronic mall had a remarkable effect on ecommerce that still shapes how businesses and customers interact with it today.

The Mall Of The Internet

Around the same time that videotex services were developing and beginning to offer an internet-like service that would lead to some early attempts at electronic shopping, Compuserve was the first company to provide a consumer-facing internet service, in part to make use of their online servers outside of business hours.

Alongside news services, electronic mail and online chat rooms, Compuserve also opened the Electronic Mall in 1984 in the United States, although it would take a decade for the same service to arrive in the UK, according to Marketing Week.

Early versions of the Electronic Mall were far closer to a videotex terminal or an online bulletin board system than they are to modern online stores, providing a range of stores and product descriptions. 

They offer online shipping and handling, and claimed that their proprietary service meant that the system was highly secure in a way that the open internet or BBSes were not.

In Defiance Of History

What is somewhat surprising is that, in spite of several retroactive revisions of the history of online shopping, CompuServe was a very successful service, and the Electronic Mall was remarkably successful and long-lasting, lasting for decades and only ending with the rise of the World Wide Web.

What helped with this was that CompuServe managed to get a lot of recognisable retailers on board for the service; at a relatively early stage, there were over 100 retailers on the Electronic Mall, and when the service launched in the UK, it was used by the likes of Tesco, WH Smith, PC World and Dixons.

It was always going to have a ceiling, however, and that ceiling was that the service was limited to subscribers of CompuServe. This was always going to make it vulnerable to alternatives that were more widely available.

The development of secure payment protocols started to diminish the appeal of the Electronic Mall by the end of the 1990s, but it would still maintain a shrinking but not insignificant niche before the end of the decade.

Ultimately, the success of the Electronic Mall highlighted that there has always been a need and a desire for online shopping, and the key to success is making the process of shopping as streamlined, easy and accessible as walking through a physical shop.