History and Evolution of E-commerce

E-commerce has always been a part of our lives. Most of us make business transactions online on such a regular basis that it is difficult to imagine a time when you were not able to do so. The meaning of electronic commerce has changed over the last 30 years. E-commerce consists of buying and selling of product or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The development of e-commerce throughout the world ranges from the widely adopted use if the internet as a medium for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to business (B2B).

During the 1970, the earliest E-commerce involves the sharing of database between supplier and their customer. The next stage of development involved electronic trading initiatives, such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) are firstly using by e-commerce to develop global technology. EDI is a principal aims to develop electronic surrogates for the myriad of paper form used in commercial transaction such as purchases orders, bills of lading, and invoices. Since the early 1970’s, efforts have been underway to develop and allowed standardized data formats for business transaction.

The growth and acceptance of credit card, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking also a form of electronic commerce in 1980’s. In 1980’s, the introduction of ATM card was the latest improvement to electronic commerce. The technology allowing this kind of commerce took hold in the 1970’s and grew steadily throughout the 1980’s. However, from the 1990’s onwards, this would include enterprise resource planning system (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

The development of e-commerce among the general public in 1994, many journalists and pundits forecast that e-commerce would soon become a major economic sector. The security protocols for example HTTPS to become sufficiently developed and widely developed.

Particularly for leaders in the specific space of e-commerce, the evolution form startup, to an unprofitable good idea, to a profitable good idea need taken some time. But companies like Amozon.com and e-bay.com has successfully broken through, establishing themselves as a viable, long term business and playing an instrumental role in cementing the role of e-commerce in the general culture.