[pyrelight]

During that time, the web was mostly brochure websites. No revenue was generated from these sites as they were purely informational.

"Web 2.0" was born during this time (maybe a little later) and introduced a paradigm shift where the Internet was becoming more commercial. It took some time for things like merchant accounts to run credit cards to become available for Internet usage, which was huge since fraud was a major consideration with Internet shopping. There was also none, or very few, SaaS eCommerce platforms like Shopify, so eCommerce was mostly a roll-your-own or use a new open source eCommerce platform that was in its infancy. It wasn't until the mid 2000s that popular self hosted platforms like OpenCart, Magento, PrestaShop, WooCommerc, etc, were available and mostly feature complete for most customers needs back then.