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How has online shopping changed over the past 25 years?

E-commerceAI Product

Drawn from Lutz Finger's Forbes column, LinkedIn writing, and Cornell teaching. Sources are cited inline so you can read the originals.

Twenty-five years later, online shopping looks surprisingly familiar.

Surprisingly, e-commerce hasn’t changed much in the last 25 years. If you compare Amazon in 1999 to Amazon today, the core structure is essentially the same. You still need to select a category, then a subcategory, and you better know what you want and where it fits. The 1999 version had long written lists. Today looks slicker with more images, but shopping is still complicated. Most of the time, subcategories let you filter by stars or price, but they don’t really describe product dimensions. For those details, you still need to click into the product and read if you care. It’s still a transactional act of buying.

AI in E-Commerce · The Keynote on AI


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