eShop Inc.

~ the last words ~

eShop Inc. ended on 11 June 1996, the day Microsoft bought it for less than fifty million dollars. CNET wrote it up that same day as one more item in a buying spree. What Microsoft wanted was the storefront engine, and it shipped one before the end of that October: Microsoft Merchant Server, released on the 30th, the company's first piece of e-commerce software. The eShop name went into a product and stayed there.

Merchant Server is the strangest thing the deal produced. It was written primarily in Python, with C++ only where the code had to plug into IIS and run as an NT service. Microsoft's first commerce product was a Python application in 1996. Only one version ever shipped. The technology was folded into Site Server 2.0, Commerce Edition in early 1997 and the Merchant Server name went with it. Microsoft had chosen that name only because Netscape was already selling something called Commerce Server.

eShop Plaza had been open for seven months when the company was sold, and the only two merchants anybody wrote down on it were American. By 1998, when the web became something I could reach from Turkey, the mall was a Microsoft product name, and eShop itself was one line on an acquisition list. The whole company lasted five years and one month, every one of them before I had a browser.

~ the record ~

~ pen computers to a mall ~

The company was incorporated on 10 May 1991 in San Mateo as Ink Development Corporation, and its first product line was software for GO Corporation's PenPoint. When PenPoint failed it moved to Windows for Pen Computing, and after that to Magic Cap. Every one of those platforms died too. Ink Development spent two years betting on an early-nineties future in which tablets arrived a decade ahead of schedule, and the bet cost it the first half of its existence.

In 1993 the company took the name eShop and switched to electronic commerce software, aimed at what the period called the business-to-consumer market. Wikipedia flags its sentence about that rename as uncited, so the year is all anybody has. The record does show a pen-computing shop in San Mateo turning itself into a web retail company before most retailers had put up a page of their own.

~ the plaza ~

eShop Plaza opened on 7 November 1995, a page of stores sharing one checkout. The citation under that sentence is an Adweek headline from the following day about Tower and Spiegel joining the mall, and the article text names no retailer at all. Two store names in somebody else's headline is the whole surviving merchant list, for a mall that ran seven months.

The mall model made one assumption, and it was wrong. It assumed that people shopping online would start at a directory of stores the way they started at a mall entrance, browsing inward. Search and a brand's own domain name took that job instead. The engine outlived the mall it was built for: eShop's code went on selling as a Microsoft server product that retailers ran on their own sites.

~ five names on the founding line ~

The founders were Arnold Blinn, Matt Kursh, Pierre Omidyar, Will Poole and Greg Stein. Omidyar had launched an online service called Auction Web on Labor Day, Monday 4 September 1995, nine months before the Microsoft deal closed, and the fees it collected were already outrunning his salary at General Magic. He made a million dollars when eShop was sold. Of all the numbers later attached to his name, that million is the smallest, and it landed first.

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