The History and Evolution of E-Commerce

Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce) is the process of buying and selling of goods and services by transferring of funds over the networks through computers by digital and business communication. It also includes all inter-company and intra-company functions such as finance, marketing, manufacturing, and selling, that enable commerce by the use of electronic mail, electronic data interchange, fax, video conferencing, file transfer, or interaction with a computer.

The history and evolution of E-Commerce is basically to determine the different phases and process of transforming information technology into business process. It also provides details about how E-Commerce began to be used as a popular mean of economic exchange which refers to online transaction of goods.

It began with the introduction of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). It is a set of standards developed in the 1960s to facilitate the interchange of vital business oriented information such as prices, inventory, and delivery with retailers making it possible to easily track trends and new products. Besides that, it enables the big business firms to indulge in a sort of beneficial electronic.

However, in the year of 1984, ASC X12 standards which also known as "ANSI X12" and "ASC X12”, is the official designation of the U.S. national standards body for the development and maintenance of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards. 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) which also refers to Mosaic web-browser, and the phenomenon of rapid personal computer (PC) usage growth. Due to the rapid expansion of the WWW network; e-commerce software; and the peer business competitions, large number of dot-com and Internet starts-ups appeared. Mosaic web-browser was the first point and click browser that could be downloaded and was name “Netscape” which allowed quicker access to E-Commerce. In the year of 1998, the development of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) expanded in California, USA. DSL allowed quicker access and a persistent connection to the Internet. December 1998 was another major step in development of E-Commerce; “The Big Online Holiday Extravaganza” had generated over $1 billion for Amazon and AOL in within 10 weeks. Red Hat Linux is the next major step of E-Commerce history which occurred on August, 1999. Linux gave users another choice in a platform other then Windows that was reliable and open-source.

In August 1999, Napster had been an online application for music lovers to share music files for free. There was a major merger in early year 2000, between AOL and Time Warner which worth approximately of $350million that brought both together a major online company and a traditional company. In the same year on February, the hackers use Denial-of-Service Attack (DoS) to attack in some E-Commerce biggest giants including Yahoo, ebay and Amazon.com.

Well, the worldwide popularity of Internet has resulted in the stable development and overwhelming acceptance of E-Commerce and provides with a rich online transaction experience. It has revolutionized further and has been converted into E-Business with the optimum usage of resources such as the internet, credit card, E-Commerce software or shopping carts solutions. Loads of companies are shifting to E-Commerce and E-Business solutions because of easy availability of clients; provide better and faster approach towards the market. These modern techniques provide new and healthy business without much needed investment. E-Business has been termed to be the fastest growing industry in this modern era of computers and finance. E-Business has proved to be the most effective way for marketing products worldwide by just a click of a button with the help of several E-Commerce’s software.

Here are some websites that you can refer to that explains more detail on the history and evolution of E-Commerce :

- Carmen Lee Jia Wen -