NetMarket

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

~ the last words ~

NetMarket was four people working out of a rented house in Nashua, New Hampshire, most of them barely out of college. Dan Kohn had the idea while he was studying at the London School of Economics, where he met Roger Lee. Guy Haskin and Eiji Hirai came from Swarthmore. What they put on the web in 1994 was a small store selling compact discs and a handful of other goods, at a point when the whole web was a few thousand sites and none of them had worked out how to take money.

On 11 August 1994 a customer in Philadelphia named Phil Brandenberger bought a copy of Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales for twelve dollars and forty-eight cents plus shipping. His card number crossed the wire encrypted, using PGP wired into a build of the X Mosaic browser. The New York Times ran the story the following morning under a headline announcing the internet was open for shopping, and described it as the first retail transaction on the internet using readily available powerful data encryption software. Every qualifier in that sentence is doing work, and later retellings dropped most of them.

In August 1994 I was ten years old in Turkey and four years off my first modem. When the web did reach me in 1998 on a 33.6k line, paying for anything with a card over it was still something almost nobody I knew did. The banking side of it showed up here years after the argument had been settled in Nashua, so the founding transaction of online shopping sits in my head as a fact I read rather than a change I lived through.

CUC International, a Connecticut membership-services company, bought the whole thing inside a year of the Sting CD. Kohn was twenty-two. The founders went off to other work and the name stayed behind, attached to an asset that kept changing owners.

~ the record ~

~ the argument about who was first ~

There is no settled answer and there never will be, because "first" depends entirely on which qualifier you keep. The Internet Shopping Network claims it beat NetMarket by weeks. Pizza Hut was taking PizzaNet orders in Santa Cruz that same August. People had been arranging purchases over research networks since the seventies if you count the cannabis deal between Stanford and MIT students that everyone always counts. What NetMarket has is the New York Times, on the record, the next day, writing about the encryption rather than the sale.

The other recurring mistake is the protocol. A great many retellings say SSL. Netscape did not ship SSL until later that year, and the NetMarket purchase ran on PGP inside a modified Mosaic, which meant the buyer had to install software before he could spend twelve dollars. Nobody was ever going to shop that way at scale, and everybody could see the shape of the thing that would replace it.

~ what the name became ~

CUC merged with HFS Incorporated in December 1997 and the result was Cendant, which promptly became one of the largest accounting fraud cases of the decade. NetMarket by then was not a store run by graduates but a one-stop internet mall, and other things CUC had bought were folded into it, including Book Stacks Unlimited out of Cleveland. In 1999 a software bug on the site exposed order records for roughly 983,000 customers. In 2001 Cendant spun the membership businesses out under Trilegiant, and NetMarket settled into its last job as a paid discount club, which it did for two decades.

~ the last redirect ~

The archive dates the end with no press to help. On 7 October 2022 netmarket.com still resolved to its own store. By 16 February 2023 the same address returned a permanent redirect to shoppersadvantage.com, another membership brand out of the same stable. Nobody wrote a closure notice. The domain does not resolve at all now.

Dan Kohn spent the rest of his career a long way from retail. He ran the Cloud Native Computing Foundation through the years Kubernetes took over server infrastructure, and he was working on the Linux Foundation's public health projects when he died of colon cancer on 1 November 2020, aged 47. The obituaries all mentioned the Sting CD.

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