In our increasingly technological world, there are more and more businesses that are choosing to make the move from high street to online. For many businesses that already have the essential groundwork done, this move proves successful. Overheads can be significantly lowered, and customer reach can also be expanded with the right knowledge. Here are some of those businesses that have proven that moving your company online can be incredibly fruitful.
There’s no older past-time than gaming, whether it’s using a roulette wheel, playing a game of cards or throwing the dice. The first casino ever built, in fact, was the Casino di Venezia, which first opened its doors to Venetians back in 1638. Although at its inception it was simply a wing of a theatre which allowed people to game in the intervals, it became so popular that just a century later there were more than 120 casinos in Venice. That means that for each year that passed, more than one brand new casino opened.
Casinos
If we fast forward several centuries to 1996 then we can see that the love of casinos remains. It was in this year that we witnessed the birth of the first online casino, InterCasino. In its first year it accepted the first ever online real money wager and since has paid out more than $3billion to online gamers. This is undoubtedly a huge sum, though still the physical casino industry has a larger market share than online. With that said though, the tides could be about to change. Whilst bricks and mortar casinos generate a staggering $130bn worldwide each year, online poker sites and casinos are catching up with a healthy $46bn for the year 2019. The growth in revenue has been marked in the past few surveys, so it could be that online casinos will overtake physical ones in the not too distant future.
Auction Houses
Auction houses were, funnily enough, one of the first types of business to recognise the potential of trading online. It used to be that an item would come up for auction and, if you weren’t present at the auction house on that day, then you wouldn’t be able to buy it. With the invention of the telephone this changed for the better, with auction lots being able to reach a bigger customer base.
Fast forward a couple of centuries and the birth of the internet again changed auction houses for the better (or the worse if you were hoping to snap up a bargain!) Now physical auction houses allowed bids from the internet, which meant that specialist objects which would perhaps only have an audience of one or two collectors, could now reach enthusiasts from around the world. This enabled lots to reach higher prices and made the auction house a nice commission.
So great was the change that the internet made to this business that now perhaps the biggest auction house in the world is entirely online. Pierre Morad Omidyar is the founder of eBay, an online auction site which was launched in 1998 and almost instantaneously made him a billionaire. Whilst the day of the brick and mortar auction house is far from over, it seems that online auctions are here to stay.