OnOff

OnOff was one of the largest electronics retailers in Sweden. The company was founded in 1971 and had 74 stores in Sweden, Finland and Estonia at its peak. The company went bankrupt in 2011.

Early e-commerce

In 1998 OnOff wanted to get into the booming e-commerce market. IBM and Icon Medialab were hired to create an online store. I was part of the team that built the site.

IBM handled the servers and the back-end while Icon Medialab was responsible for the front-end. The site was built using HTML and a little bit of JavaScript. Maybe CSS, I'm not sure if it was even invented yet.

Design

The end

Unfortunately, the website was never released. I'm not sure why exactly, but back then, electronic retailers in Sweden kept their prices secret. The idea was that you should visit the store to see the price. The company was afraid that if they published the prices online, customers would only visit the site to compare prices and then buy the product in the store.

They did release an e-commerce website a few years later though, but I was not part of that project.