iCanBuy

» see icanbuy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The mechanism was the whole product. A parent opened an account with a credit card, put money into it, and then picked which of the partner stores their child was allowed to spend it at, with a separate transaction limit per store. The kid logged in under their own password, shopped inside that fence, and could move part of the balance into savings or give it away to a charity from the same screen. No card number ever passed through the child's hands.

It opened in March 1999 out of the San Francisco Bay Area, with R. Paul Herman as chief executive and Gayle Keck as president. Herman had come through McKinsey and Wharton and liked to describe himself as a quantitative geek; Keck had come out of advertising agencies with a Clio for her last commercial. The savings side ran with Security First Network Bank. The shopping side started with a handful of stores and was past twenty within months, Cyberian Outpost and Beyond.com and CDNow among them.

For about a year it was one of the most written-about small companies in the country. Their own press page, archived in October 2000, lists Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Reuters, USA Today and American Banker, and the Business Week headline from February 1999 catches the pitch exactly: "Shape Up, Kid, or I'll Delete Your Allowance". Two rivals launched within weeks of each other that June, RocketCash and DoughNET, and the trade press spent the rest of 1999 treating teen digital wallets as a settled category waiting to be filled.

~ the case file ~

~ the advisor team ~

The part that still reads well is that the site had teenage columnists. An Advisor Team page carries photographs and short pieces by kids identified only by first name, writing about saving and giving. One of them runs the compound interest argument: eighteen dollars a month from now until you are sixty-five makes you a millionaire. Another says investing is more fair than regular teenage jobs. It is the only section of the site that sounds like a teenager wrote it.

~ November ~

The site was serving normally on 19 October 2000. By 18 November its pages were returning 404. In between, iCanBuy announced that it was closing: no new accounts, no new orders, and money or gift certificates already sitting in accounts would be refunded. Women's Wear Daily, which had covered the teen shopping category closely from the fashion side, ran the story under the headline "ICANBUY TO SHUT DOWN".

The stated reason was that teenagers were not buying enough on the web to carry it, and the same autumn took most of the category down with it. By September 2001 icanbuy.com was a registrar's placeholder reading "Welcome to the future website of icanbuy.com".

~ what a Turkish fifteen-year-old had instead ~

I was fifteen when this launched, and the premise needs a credit card in the house plus a parent willing to attach it to a website. In Turkey in 1999 almost nobody I knew bought anything online at all. Pocket money was cash, and the internet was something you paid for by the minute on the phone bill, which meant the cost of browsing a mall for an hour was itself the thing your parents noticed. An allowance that arrived as an account with permissions attached sounded like science fiction with chores in it.

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