The History and Evolution of E-commerce
E-commerce is any business related transactions partially or totally carried out by electronic medium especially on internet using Open networks or Closed network. The most important feature accountable for the success of internet is electronic commerce that allows people to buy or sell anything they want at anytime of the day or night. The process of advancement in Information Technology to develop into a business transaction is the e-commerce history.
The term e-commerce meant the process of execution of commercial transactions electronically with the help of the leading technologies such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) which gave an opportunity for users to exchange business information and do electronic transactions. The ability to use these technologies appeared in the late 1970s and allowed business companies and organizations to send commercial documentation electronically.
The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of electronic commerce. From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing. Perhaps it is introduced from the Telephone Exchange Office, or maybe not. 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.
- In general the first business deal carried out on telephone or via a fax is mainly considered as first e-commerce transaction.
- In 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.
- 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.
- 1984: EDI, or electronic data interchange, was standardized through ASC X12. the ASC X12 standard became stable and reliable in transferring large amounts of transactions.
- 1992: The National Science Foundation lifted restrictions on the Internet allowing commercial use. CompuServe offers online retail products to its customers. This gives people the first chance to buy things off their computer.
- 1994: Netscape arrived which 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 which is EBay and Amazon.com. Generally, B2C websites are the bridge that link customers to suppliers such as EBay, online auction. Beside that, the B2C concerns itself with selling to the end user such as Amazon, online book retailers. On the other hand, the e-commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as B2B such as Microsoft sell his software to other organization.
- 1998: DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line, was launched into the market that provided much faster access and persistent connection to the internet. AOL swamped the market and had about 1.2 billion sales over a period of 10 weeks from online sales. E-commerce spread to a significant group globally within a span of 4 years from 1996 to 2000.
- Today the largest electronic commerce is Business-to-Business (B2B). Businesses involved in B2B sell their goods to other businesses. In 2001, this form of e-commerce had around $700 billion in transactions. Other varieties growing today include Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) where consumers sell to each other, for example through auction sites.
In the very beginning, many people will have doubt on e-commerce but now it is become a modern tool, not only e-commerce revolutionized the world of wholesale, but also retail. As a result of that, the businesses are now continually searching for new ways to meet the needs of the online market such as Wal-Mart, they target on integrating consumer relationship with e-commerce industry to increases their customer base.
The technology used for e-commerce is young, but it's expanding faster than any before it and will soon be the most advanced system the world has ever seen and e-commerce is still one of the leading forces of economic growth today.
http://www.ecommerce-journal.com/articles/electronic_commerce_aka_e_commerce_history
http://ecommerce.networksolutions.com/ecommerce_what_is_ecommerce.asp
by Wong Leed Chen
0 comments:
Post a Comment