At first, the Internet was only used by governments and academics to help them exchange information.

But as it continued to grow and improve, more and more people gained access to it - even people with little computer knowledge.

Today there are hundreds of millions of people using the Internet anywhere in the world to access information stored online.

Whilst it didn’t start like this, smart business people soon realized that wherever lots of people meet, you can sell them something.

e-Commerce was born when the first shop opened on the Internet in 1994 and started to sell good online - only a year before Steffan Klein and Michael Veith hatched the idea for ShopFactory - the world's first Do-It-Yourself e-commerce solution for non-programmers.

The first shops before ShopFactory were handcoded by specialist programmers and cost huge amonts of money.

Some business people went absolutely crazy and spent hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to try to sell their goods on the Internet. Of course especially at the beginning there weren’t enough customers on the Internet to support such huge investments. So they went broke.

How things have changed since then.

Today hundreds of millions of people buy online. Shopping cart software such as ShopFactory allow you to create your very own websites for just a few hundred dollars. There is no need to go broke to start selling online.

The low costs of getting started, the positive results many businesses are experiencing and the ease of use if e-commerce software have led to an explosion of online shops.

The Internet has become the super mall of today.