zakazpiva.nn.ru was the website of a home and office beer delivery service, operating in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone nn.ru in 2003. The site took orders for unfiltered draft beer "Elf" and promised to deliver it "throughout Nizhny Novgorod within 1 hour of ordering"[1]. The contact address listed on the page was Nizhny Novgorod, Piskunova Street, 30, "Internet company NNRU," phone 19-77-99[1].

What the site looked like

The home page served simultaneously as a storefront and an order form. The menu had four items: "Elf Beer," "Order," "Information," "Contacts"[1]. The order form asked for a contact person, phone number, and address, and the hint text for the address field listed what stood in for navigation back in 2003: "entrance number, route inside the building, floor, entrance door lock code"[1].

Delivery time was chosen from three options — "Immediately," "Today," "Tomorrow" — accompanied by two drop-down lists of hours, "from" and "to," in one-hour steps from 11:00 to 22:00[1]. A separate field was labeled "Additional information." The surviving page text shows no shopping cart, no registration, and no online payment: the order went out as a single form.

What was on offer

The assortment consisted of a single item. As the home page stated, visitors were offered "unfiltered draft beer 'Elf,' produced by the Nizhny Novgorod company 'NashePivo'," with a link to its site www.pivo.nn.ru[1]. The unit of sale was a five-liter bottle: "1 bottle = 5 liters," priced at 200 rubles with delivery included[1].

The product description was written in the advertising tone typical of its time: the beer was "brewed entirely from imported raw materials using a unique classic recipe of its own devising," had "a pleasant malty taste balanced by a hoppy aroma," and enjoyed "a high rating on the beer market of the Nizhny Novgorod region"[1]. The delivery schedule was laid out plainly: weekdays from 1 pm to 9 pm, weekends from 11 am to 9 pm[1].

At the bottom of the page was an invitation that reveals the project's ambitions went beyond a single beverage: "We offer cooperation to companies delivering shashlik, pizza, and other goods and services"[1]. In other words, the platform was built as a template for a citywide delivery service that other firms could plug into, with beer as its first — and, judging by the surviving snapshots, only — product.

Who ran the site

The contacts section directed questions "about the site's operation" not to the brewers but to an internet company: address — Nizhny Novgorod, Piskunova Street, 30, "Internet company NNRU," email www@nn.ru, phone 19-77-99[1]. Judging by the page text, the product and delivery were handled by the NashePivo brewery, while the site itself was run by an internet firm. For the early Nizhny Novgorod Internet, such a division of labor was common: the internet firm handled the storefront and order intake, while the trade itself remained with the client company.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet, and how it closed

The site left no notable trace in the statistics. In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating that we hold, the domain zakazpiva.nn.ru does not appear, and no traffic figures were recorded for it; the overall picture from the counter is examined in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. The domain is likewise absent from the surviving results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote in 2004[3]; the last traces of the site's operation date to 2003, more than a year before that vote.

All surviving snapshots of the home page date to 2003, and between the June and August captures the text did not change by a single word — the same price, delivery hours, and invitation to cooperate[2]. The last snapshot of the site in the web archive is dated August 9, 2003[2].

What remains of the project is an order form with a hint about the entrance lock code, a five-liter bottle for 200 rubles, and a promise of one-hour delivery — an exact imprint of what city e-commerce looked like before the arrival of aggregators and mobile apps.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote results, 2004 (archive)