marketsThe advent of online shopping has resulted in the development of a large number of rewards programs that offer rewards for shopping through specific shopping portals. These rewards can be points-based (allowing redemption for various prizes), cashback, airline frequent flyer-miles-based, hotel points, or even donations to charity.
Rewards portals exist in most major markets, most notably in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. The original loyalty program was started in 1896 by Sperry & Hutchinson called Green Stamps which has been digitized into the new S&H greenpoints.com. In the early 1900s, Carlson Marketing owned a company called Gold Stamps and that has similarly been rebranded as GoldPoints.com. One of the most successful programs that currently exist is called AirMiles out of Canada and, like the old Green/Gold Stamps programs it includes everyday spending in supermarkets.
PayPal was founded in December 1998 by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of its first premises was the 165 University Avenue office in Palo Alto, California, home of a number of other noted Silicon Valley startups. On the business side, many of its initial recruits were alumni of The Stanford Review, which was also founded by Peter Thiel. Most of the early engineers hailed from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recruited by Max Levchin. In its initial incarnation, PayPal was a service for users to send money via PDAs, with actor James Doohan, Star Trek's "Scotty," as its spokesman. The PDA software was later discarded in favor of a web-based system that became popular with eBay's millions of buyers and sellers. Coupled with aggressive marketing campaigns offering $10 (and later $5) for new users to sign up, the firm grew at a meteoric rate of 7–10 percent per day between January and March 2000.
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