The founders also want to be more than just a point-of-sale site, they want to give specialty products, those produced by mom-and-pop stores (the ones most likely to be wiped out by the growth of eCommerce and flash sales portals) a place to live online.
With a semester left in college, Sameer then decided to move on from Lush Entertainment and start working on a new startup called JungleCents, which started out as an auction type of ecommerce store, where people would pay a flat fee to get into the auction then bid on penny increments.
Flash marketing, or social commerce, startups like Gilt Groupe and Groupon have "come out of nowhere" and are revolutionizing ecommerce.
In the U.S. Amazon paved the way for carving a huge chunk out of the ecommerce pie by patenting the right to one-click buying, all the way back in 1999.
Amazon has a plurality yet a distinct minority of ecommerce share ($25B in 2009 revenue out of WW ecommerce rev of $600B) yet has a market cap of $74B , 2.5Xthat of eBay.
Ms. Teslik and other pay and governance experts are also sharply critical of Mr. Sidgmore's decision not to step down as chairman and chief executive of Ecommerce Industries of Vienna, Va., when he was named WorldCom's chief executive after the company forced out Bernard J. Ebbers.
"Clearly something does not add up when we consider the phenomenal growth of ecommerce and the demand on UK supply chain, yet an established distributor has gone out of business," said Patrick Gallagher, chief executive of rival carrier CitySprint.
While in that position, Mr. Sidgmore became chairman of Ecommerce Industries in July 1999.
Other types of ecommerce use more energy than one would expect, however.
Mark Kelly, head of ecommerce at The Fragrance Shop, says: "It's improved the way we collected online payments.
