About 100 shipping internet sites exploded onto the scene during the dot.com boom from 2000. Only a few still survive.
High-profile players such as LevelSeas, Setfair and MaritimeDirect burned large piles of investment capital without making any commercial impact.
And yet online transactions are now everyday to us — and many of the processes envisaged by the dot.com pioneers have become as normal to the shipping industry as to everyone else.
