The History and Evolution of E-commerce

Introduction

What is E-commerce? Well, E-commerce is any business related transactions partially or totally carried out by electronic medium especially on internet using Open networks or Closed network. It is the process of buying and selling or exchanging products, services, and information via computer networks.

History

It all started during 1960’s. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) was formulated. This is a set of standard instructions to interchange data and to carry out business deals electronically. Then in 1969 ARPANET, was developed by Americas department of defence for researching new reliable networks and later this enhanced into Internet that was purely used as a research tool for nearly 20yrs. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee developed World Wide Web at CERN that started the first Internet transaction. These technology supported exchange of data that was in text format only. The first business deal took place in 1994 and since then there have been billions of dealings. Later in 1998 DSL was launched into the market that provided much faster access and persistent connection to the internet. In 1998, AOL swamped the market and had about 1.2 billion sales over a period of 10 weeks from online sales. That was one of the brightest points in e-commerce history. Amazon and eBay were the first International companies that implemented electronic transactions. Initial public offerings by Amazon, and EBay had tremendous success. Soon after, almost everyone started implementing business on internet.

Evolution

1984

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

1992

CompuServe offers online retail products to its customers. This gives people the 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 that were Amazon.com and eBay.com.

1998

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.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can say that the usage of E-commerce has really boom in the past two decades. Much has evolved after its yester years and many inventions have been made to make e-commerce what it is today. 3 things have been a main factor to the evolving of e-commerce that is online reliability, safety and confidentiality. Because of these factors, people are more likely to use it then traditional method and are able to improve on the usage of e-commerce in their daily life. As you can see e-commerce is the future of doing business and it has the potential to grow even better that it is already.

Related Links:

http://www.smallbusinessnewz.com/

http://newmedia.medill.northwestern.edu/courses/nmpspring01/brown/Revstream/ecommerceindex.htm