Home Shopping commonly refers to the electronic retailing / home shopping channels industry, which includes such billion dollar companies as HSN, QVC, eBay, ShopNBC, Buy.com, and Amazon.com. Home shopping allows consumers to shop for goods while in the privacy of their own home, as opposed to traditional shopping, which requires you to visit brick and mortar stores and shopping malls.

History

The home shopping / electronic retailing industry was created in 1977 when small market radio talk show host Bob Circosta was asked to sell avocado-green-colored can openers live on the air by station owner Bud Paxson when an advertiser traded 112 units of product instead of paying his advertising bill. Hesitant at first, Circosta reluctantly obliged – and to both men's great surprise, all 112 can openers sold out within the hour. Paxson sensed the vast sales potential of home-based commerce, and founded the world's first shopping channel on cable television, later launching nationwide with the Home Shopping Network (rebranded as HSN). Bob Circosta was America's first ever TV home shopping host, becoming one of the most instantly recognizable salesmen in the free world. Over the next three decades, Circosta sold over 75,000 different products on HSN, netted over 20,000 hours of live, on-air TV selling – and achieved personal product sales in excess of one billion dollars. Teleshopping or buying from a domestic television or PC was invented by Michael Aldrich who in 1979 demonstrated real-time transaction processing from a domestic television and went on to pioneer these systems in the UK during the 1980s including the world's first supermarket system. Aldrich's ideas are the basis of today's internet shopping. The home shopping industry quickly revolutionized global commerce. In fact, the two most successful home shopping channels – HSN and QVC – generate a combined total of ten billion dollars in sales every year.

eBay

eBay was created in the mid-1990s by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar. The very first item ever sold by the company was a broken laser pointer. eBay currently generates over four-and-a-half billion dollars annually.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com began as an online bookstore in 1994, created by Wall Street computer scientist Jeff Bezos. In addition to books, Amazon eventually added video games, computer software, electronics, apparel, and more to its sales repetoire. The company now generates approximately eight-and-a-half billion dollars annually.

Direct response

Direct response is often considered to be a part of the home shopping / electronic retailing industry. The Electronic Retailing Association, when adding together all the combined revenues from all the home shopping companies, estimates that in 2005, the industry generated over 320 billion dollars.