It's been almost exactly 6 years since the very first release of BV Commerce. It was the very first commercial ecommerce software for the .NET platform and we're still going strong. I started writing the first version back in September of 2001 and it was released in February as soon as the .Net Framework 1.0 was official released.

I'm often asked "What does 'BV' stand for?" The truth is it could stand for a lot of things but "Best Value" is the answer I usually give. I went through tons of names but it seems like every domain name in the world related to commerce was taken back in 2001. Would you believe that even "jerboa" was taken? So "BVSoftware.com" was available and "Best Value" sounded good enough. If I called it "comrc" or some other misspelling I'd probably have $5M in VC money right now :-)

The BV Software logo has changed a lot since the first days too:  

The very first BV logo. I thought purple was a good choice!


The image of a methane molecule that served as a template for the next BV Logo

 
The very first "molecule" version of the BV logo.

The third BV logo with a 3D glossy molecule and more red!



A green version that never made it but did introduce the ITC Kabel font.

Current BV Software Logo
 

New design idea for dropping molecule symbol

I sold exactly 16 copies of BV Commerce 1.0. It didn't support choices or options and was all table based design. BV Commerce 2.0 followed less than 6 months later with a host of improvements and things have been growing non-stop since.

P.S. If you see Randy from GlobalWeb.net on the forums he was the very first BV Commerce customer and is still an active host/developer in our community!