The History & Evolution of E-Commerce

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, consists of the buying and selling of product or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.

History of E-Commerce

The meaning of "electronic commerce" has changed over the last 30 years. Originally, "electronic commerce" meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of e-commerce. From the 1990s onwards, e-commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

Perhaps the earliest example of many-to-many electronic commerce in physical goods was the Boston Computer Exchange, a marketplace for used computers launched in 1982. The first online information marketplace, including online consulting, was likely the American Information Exchange, another pre-Internet online system introduced in 1991.

When the Web first became well-known among the general public in 1994, many journalists and pundits forecast that e-commerce would soon become a major economic sector. However, it took about four years for security protocols (like HTTPS) to become sufficiently developed and widely deployed.

In the dot com era, e-commerce came to include activities more precisely termed "Web commerce" -- the purchase of goods and services over the World Wide Web, usually with secure connections, with e-shopping carts and with electronic payment services such as credit card payment authorizations.

Evolution of E-Commerce

The evolution of e-commerce can be attributed to a combination regulatory reform and technological innovation. Through Internet (which played an important role in the evolution) appeared in the late 1960s, e-commerce now took off with the arrival of the World Wide Web and browsers in the 1990s.

Here is the timeline of the evolution of e-commerce,

1984
EDI, or electronic data interchange, was standardized through ASC X12. This guaranteed that companies would be able to complete transactions with one another reliably.

1992
Compuserve offers online retail products to its customers. This gives people the first chance to buy things off their computer.

1994
Netscape arrived. Providing users a simple browser to surf the Internet and a safe online transaction technology called Secure Sockets Layer.

1995
Two of the biggest names in e-commerce are launched: Amazon.com and eBay.com.

1998
DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line, provides fast, always-on Internet service to subscribers across California. This prompts people to spend more time, and money, online.

1999
Retail spending over the Internet reaches $20 billion, according to Business.com.

2000
The U.S government extended the moratorium on Internet taxes until at least 2005.


By:
Lim Hooi Ting 0701396