The History and Evolution of E-Commerce

What is Commerce?


Commerce is and the exchanging and buying of goods and services occurred before recorded history, now commerce is a basic activity of goods trading and buying in everyday life.

What is E-Commerce?

E-commerce (electronic commerce or EC) is the buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet, especially the World Wide Web. In practice, this term and a newer term, e-business, are often used interchangeably. For online retail selling, the term e-tailing is sometimes used.

How E-commerce gets started?

Entering into the electronic era, the way individuals and organizations do business and undertake commercial transactions have been changed. This indicates the movement towards electronic commerce. This means there is no paper work and physical interaction is limited.

• In the early of 1970s
  
  The emergence of electronic commerce started in the early 1970s with the earliest example electronic funds transfer (EFT), which allows organizations to transfer funds between one another electronically.
  
  electronic interchange (EDI) was introduced. It helps to extend inter-business transactions from financial institutions to other types of business and also provides transactions and information exchanges from suppliers to the end customers. However, the early system development was limited to special networks.

• During the 1990s
  
  With a highly developed global Internet community technology, a strong foundation of prosperous electronic commerce continues to be built. During the 1990s, the Internet was opened for commercial use; it was also the period that users started to participate in World Wide Web (WWW), and the phenomenon of rapid personal computer (PCs) usage growth.
  
  Due to the rapid expansion of the WWW network; e-commerce software; and the peer business competitions, large number of dot-coms and Internet starts-ups appeared.

Timeline

• 1990: Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, using a NeXT computer.
  
• 1992: J.H. Snider and Terra Ziporyn published Future Shop: How New Technologies Will Change the Way We Shop and What We Buy. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312063598.
  
• 1994: Netscape released the Navigator browser in October under the code name Mozilla. Pizza Hut offered pizza ordering on its Web page. The first online bank opened. Attempts to offer flower delivery and magazine subscriptions online. Adult materials were also commercially available, as were cars and bikes. Netscape 1.0 in late 1994 introduced SSL encryption that made transactions secure.
  
• 1995: Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com and the first commercial-free 24 hour, internet-only radio stations, Radio HK and NetRadio started broadcasting. Dell and Cisco began to aggressively use Internet for commercial transactions. eBay was founded by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb.
  
• 1998: Electronic postal stamps can be purchased and downloaded for printing from the Web.
  
• 1999: business.com was sold for US $7.5 million, which was purchased in 1997 for US $150,000. The peer-to-peer filesharing software Napster was launched.
  
• 2000: The dot-com bust.
  
• 2003: Amazon.com had its first year with a full year of profit.
  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commerce
  

In 2007, Fortune magazine ranked Dell as the 34th-largest company in the Fortune 500 list and 8th on its annual Top 20 list of the most successful and admired companies in the USA in recognition of the company’s business model.

According to the research conducted in 2008, the domain Amazon.com attracted about 615 million customers every year.

Source: http://www.ecommerce-land.com/history_ecommerce.html