A Virtual Business conducts all or most of its business via the internet and does not have physical premises to interact with customers face-to-face. A purely virtual company may outsource nearly all of their business functions such as product development, marketing, sales, shipping, etc. However, most virtual businesses retain some of these activities in-house and may still require a physical presence in the form of headquarters, warehouses, shipping and delivery hubs, etc.
Virtual retailing is the most common form of virtual business. It began in the early 1980’s (before the widespread adoption of the internet and world-wide-web) as companies such as AOL and CompuServe began offering subscription-based, dial-up services such as email, chat, electronic bulletin boards, and forums, all delivered through primitive text-based interfaces on various computer platforms. Available services eventually expanded to include news wire, stock quotes, and online shopping.
The advent of the internet opened up a vast online marketplace for virtual business. The development of security protocols such as SSL in 1994 enabled sensitive data such as credit card information to be safely transmitted over the World Wide Web (WWW) and e-commerce exploded as a result. Unfortunately, the move to internet retailing was a case of too much too fast and during the dot-com crash of 2000 – 2002 few internet retailers survived.
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