Internet Shopping Trivia Quiz

Answer: Amazon and eBay

Amazon.com and eBay are often considered among the most interesting and influential players in internet shopping. Amazon, launched in 1995, became profitable only in 2003. By 2008 it had reached over US$19 billion in revenues and had 615 million visitors to the site. Popularizing online auction sales, eBay.com had over US$8 billion in revenues during 2008. Although a majority of its transactions are still from the auction format, a substantial portion of sales are direct retail (not through bidding auctions) sales.

Answer: Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut and Papa John's seem to be in a mild argument over who was first to have substantial online ordering, but most sources credit Pizza Hut with the "first", even if in only a limited area. Pizza Hut expects to reach $1 billion in online sales by 2012, and as a group the major pizza delivery corporations - Papa John's, Pizza Hut, and Domino's - do about half of their sales online today.

Answer: A broken laser pointer

Actually all of the items listed have been sold on eBay, but the broken laser pointer was the first. It sold for $14.83. The head of eBay emailed the buyer to be sure the buyer knew it was a broken item, and was told that in fact the buyer collected broken laser pointers. The grilled cheese sandwich, by the way, supposedly resembled the Virgin Mary. It sold for $28,000.

Answer: Grew nearly 12 percent

Yes, even with a substantial slowdown in most world economies, the top 500 online retailers' sales increased by 11.7 percent in 2008 compared to a year earlier. Their total sales were $116 billion. Interestingly, for many chain stores with both a physical and an online sales component, internet sales grew while physical store sales declined.

This was true for 41 of the 50 biggest chains. These statistics are from the U.S. Department of Commerce and so apply specifically to the United States, although with web sales that concept is increasingly difficult to define. Total U.S. retail sales in 2008 were $2.7 trillion, and of this amount about $178 billion was through online sales.

Answer: Mobile phone

Yes, mobile phones - the cell phone, smartphones, PDAs, communications devices that we once thought of as small telephones are now highly diffused in most populations around the globe. Online retailers are in a mad race to adapt their websites to accommodate ordering from phones but with a graphics/web-based interface, and especially to take advantage of SMS text capabilities.

The huge online auction site eBay is a leader in this effort, with mobile phone bidding applications and text notifications when bids change, and so forth. Apple's iPhones have "apps" for Pizza Hut that allow one-click ordering (as do several other cellphones).

In 2009, Amazon introduced an iPhone "app" that allows you to take of photo of anything, send it to Amazon, and Amazon will match it with a product page and send it to you for ordering!

Answer: PayPal

PayPal was established in its current form in 2000 and within two years completely overshadowed eBay Payments (which is what eBay renamed Billpoint when it acquired it), even as a payment method for eBay auctions. In fact, eBay was so impressed, they purchased PayPal in 2002 at a price of $1.5 billion.

Answer: Ratio of visitors who buy something to the total number of visitors

All online sellers want to maximize profits of course, and one of the key ways to do that is to increase the likelihood that if a potential customer comes to a site, he or she will purchase something. This ratio of visitors who buy to total visitors is called the conversion rate.

The highest conversion rates do not always belong to the most well known or biggest sites. For example, in May of 2009 the highest conversion rate was for a site called ProFlowers, with fully 38 percent of their visitors purchasing from the site.

Interestingly, the 1800Flowers site also ranked among the top 10 in conversion rate. It may be that when someone visits a flower site, it's because they really want or need to get flowers, whereas for many sites there is more browsing.

Answer: Rakuten Ichiba, from Japan

Rakuten Ichiba, or Rakuten Marketplace, is an aggressive, profitable Japanese company whose business model is almost entirely B2B2C, meaning it's a go-between from thousands of Japanese companies to consumers ("business to business to consumers"). It has no direct sales operation like Amazon. As of 2009 it offered 35 million products compared to Amazon's 10 million, in Japan, and for most of 2007 and 2008 had about 3 million daily visitors compared to Amazon's 1.5 million visitors in Japan. The economic slowdown has affected both companies but Rakuten maintains its strong lead.

Answer: Expedia

You almost certainly know the major players: Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, Travelocity, and the like. Travel expenditures account for about US$800 billion worldwide (as of 2009) and almost one-third of that amount is sold through online transactions. Expedia, a spinoff of Microsoft, is a dominant player in this lucrative field. And admit it, you can hear that little "Expedia...dot...com!" jingle running through your head, right?

Answer: The iTunes Store

Indeed, the Apple iTunes Store puts all other commercial music sites to shame. It accounts for 70 percent of all online digital music sales, and in fact was the first site to demonstrate the feasibility of the online music enterprise. By the end of 2008 the iTunes Store had sold 6 billion songs. It has to be admitted, of course, that the iTunes Store has a big advantage in this market, given the enormous popularity of Apple's iTunes software and the iPod digital music player.