The history and evolution of E-commerce

Electronic Commerce is a type of business model and enables people buying, selling, transferring, or exchanging products, services or information over the internet with the help of technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a set of standards developed in the 1960’s to exchange business information and do electronic transactions and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) is transfer of funds between accounts by electronic such as Automatic Teller Machines (ATM). From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce includes enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

The Internet was conceived in 1969 and started by the U.S government during and its opening users were a largely technical audience of government agencies and academic research and scientists. In the early 1990s, when the internet was opened to commercial use and users began participate in the World Wide Web (WWW), e-commerce application rapidly expanded so that a large number of dot-coms also appeared. During year 1994, internet begins popularity in public and start developed the DSL which allowed fast access and constant connection to the internet and also develop the security protocols such as HTTP. In 1999, the e-commerce shifted from business-to-consumer to business-to-business and in 2001 from business-to-business to business-to-exchange.

Amazon and Ebay were the first internet companies to allow electronic transactions and currently, there have 5 largest and famous worldwide internet retailers which are Amazon, Dell, Staples, Office Depot and Hewlett Packard. During 2000, the dot-com collapse and causes many of e-commerce companies disappeared including Amazon. However, in 2003 the company made its first annual profit which was the first step to the further development. Dell was the company that contributes a lot to e-commerce development. The company’s unique strategy of selling goods over the World Wide Web with no retail outlets and no middlemen has been attracted by a lot of customers and imitated by a great number of ecommerce businesses. The key factor of Dell’s success is that Dell.com enables customers to choose and to control.

The summary of evolution e-commerce is:
1984
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) was standardized through ASC X12. This guaranteed that companies would be able to complete transactions with one another reliability.

1990
Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser, World Wide Web (WWW), using a NeXT computer.

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

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

1995
Two biggest names in e-commerce are launched which is Amozon.com and eBay.com

1998
The Digital Subscriber line (DSL) provides faster, always-on Internet service to subscriber across California. This prompts people to spent more time, and money, online.

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

2000
The dot-com bust.

2003
Amazon had its first year with a full year of profit.




The resources adopted from:
(1) http://www.ecommerce-land.com/history_ecommerce.html
(2) http://newmedia.medill.northwestern.edu/courses/nmpspring01/brown/Revstream/history.htm
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commerce