A 1997 BBC report on the profitability of internet shopping featuring a young Jeff Bezos

A classic clip from the BBC archives shows a November 1997 episode of The Money Programme, in which presenter Nils Blythe spoke to early Internet retailers to find out whether shopping on the Internet was really profitable.

It’s supposed to be the future of business, but selling goods over the internet – e-tail, e-commerce, whatever you want to call it – hasn’t yet captured the public’s imagination. Has the internet’s potential impact been overstated?

First, he spoke to the owner of a small bakery that processed orders over the Internet. He also spoke to a young American named Jeff Bezos, who had just founded his book startup Amazon 30 days before the interview, and to Daryll Mattocks, the founder of The Internet Bookshop in Cambridge.

Nils speaks to Jeff Bezos, whose online bookstore Amazon.com shipped books to 45 different countries in its first 30 days. …In the UK, Daryl Mattocks launched the Internet Bookshop at the same time as Amazon, but business was much slower than its US counterpart – partly due to the price difference between books in the US and the UK. Mr Mattocks admits that the future of online retailing may belong to the Americans.

Related articles