Five or ten years is about the right timeframe to think about consumers shifting their commerce online, because that is about how long it takes for consumer habits to change on a broad scale.

Judge at the 2005 horizon (five to ten years after June 1995). The claim is that consumer commerce habits, chiefly shopping and buying online, would change on a broad scale by then. TRUE: by 2005, buying online had become a mainstream habit. For example, a majority of US Internet users, or a large share of US adults, had bought goods or services online, and online commerce was routine across many retail categories, as shown in Pew/Census-type data. MOSTLY TRUE: online buying was mainstream among Internet users, but adoption across the general population or across categories was somewhat narrower than 'broad scale' suggests. MIXED: a substantial minority of consumers had adopted online buying, with a clear but incomplete shift. MOSTLY FALSE: online commerce stayed confined mostly to early adopters or a few categories, with only a small share of consumers buying online regularly. FALSE: no meaningful change in consumer commerce habits by 2005. E-commerce's small share of total retail sales does not by itself defeat the claim, which is about how widely consumers adopted the habit.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 World Wide Web Timeline Pew Research Center · 11 March 2014

   “40 million Americans – or 48% of internet users – have purchased a product online.”

2. E2 Number of Online Shoppers Holding Steady Gallup News Service · 6 March 2006

   “Thirty-six percent of U.S. adults in 2003 said they regularly shopped online, compared with 38% in 2005.”

3. E3 Is There a Digital Divide in Online Shopping? Gallup News Service · 20 December 2005

   “About 3 in 10 panelists say they purchased merchandise online or from an Internet-based retailer in the last 30 days.”

4. E4 E-TAILING AND ITS PROSPECTS—GREAT EXPECTATIONS RECONSIDERED U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies (Jeffrey L. Mayer) · July 2006

   “One reason why the e-tail share of retailing has grown more slowly than some observers anticipated is that consumers were slower than expected to adjust to e-commerce sales environments”

The evidence shows that a large minority of US adults regularly shopped online by 2005 [E2][E3]. It does not show with a date that online buying was mainstream among Internet users: the only Internet-user figure, 48% [E1], is under half and has no year. The evidence therefore does not settle the claim under the criteria.