The history and evolution of E-commerce

Today we are going to discuss about the history and evolution of e-commerce. Let’s all start off with the history of e-commerce.

So what is e-commerce?

E-commerce is an exchange of ideas, goods, and services through the electronic marketplace (the internet). However, these goods and services are exchanged for money.

How does E-commerce begin?

The history of e-commerce is the concept of internal trade that can be sentenced in the precise point of view as its role in promoting. It is through frontier transfer of good and services or import or exports and global sourcing.

Although e-commerce has been around for centuries, but the initial available records is in 1984 when the electronic data interchange was invented, which helped companies to bring out their connections in a much more reliable approach than before in terms of international trade, import or export and global sourcing.

Year 1984

In 1984, EDI or electronic data interchange was standardized through ASC X12. This guaranteed that companies would be able to complete transactions with one another reliably.

Year 1992

In 1992, Compuserve is the first records of a company letting people buy things off the computer. It provides an inferior basis for future development in the stage. Compuserve offers online retail products to its customers. This gives people the first chance to buy things off their computer.

Year 1994

In 1994, Marc Andreesen is the one who create a browser by the name of Mosaic, which was suited into the Netscape browser. This permitted for the common consumer to exploit the internet, against only somebody who has the knowledge of a computer expert. Netscape arrived. Providing users a simple browser to surf the Internet and a safe online transaction technology called Secure Sockets Layer.

Year 1995

As a consequence, in 1995 there are two of the biggest names in e-commerce are launched which are Amazon.com and eBay.com.

Year 1998

DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line, provides fast, always-on Internet service to subscribers across California. This prompts people to spend more time, and money, online.

Year 1999

As a matter of fact in 1999, the retail sales on the internet had achieved as high as twenty billion dollars.

Evolution of E-commerce
After the history, let us look at the trend or evolution in the e-commerce industry currently in 2009. Here’s what we see in Ecommerce Gazette.

1. Shop Blogs.

Over the years, there is been an increasing amount of shop blogs around the internet lately. So what are shop blogs? They are blogs (instead of ecommerce sites with .com, shop blogs uses url such as blogspot.com or xanga.com) which are used to sell mainly goods and services online.

So the question is “is a shop blog considered as an ecommerce website?”

Well, we would give a yes to that.

And why do we say so?

Firstly, ecommerce can be said to be an electronic marketing medium and shop blogs fit as an electronic marketing medium as people uses the blogs to market or promote their products and services via the blogs.

Secondly, shop blogs can perform most of their transactions via the internet without the requirement of most physical encounter other forms of business needs. The only limitation to shop blogs is that delivery of goods still requires some form of physical encounter may it be courier services and/or delivery by the shop blog’s owner.

And with this ongoing trend, we can see more and more people are setting up their own blogs to sell goods especially. Younger generations, mainly students are developing skills to become potential entrepreneurs where the opportunities doesn’t exist before now becomes easily accessible.

2. User friendliness.

The limitation to the past e-commerce is the lack of user friendly interface for the customers to come by. However, currently, e-commerce has break free from this so called barrier and customers now have user friendly interface such as the GUI when they are shopping via the internet.

As we can see from e-commerce giant’s websites such as Ebay and Amazon, they provide easy to use interface with step to step instructions for everyone including the non computer savvy users. A function such as the shopping cart is implemented to the website to make customer’s shopping experience much easier. The interfaces are yet improving day after day and soon enough we might even experience life shopping experience through the internet.

3. Interactive Medias vs. Online Advertising.

Videos, flash etc. etc, you name it all. We know that there’s so much interactive media, we from the Ecommerce Gazette lost count of them every time.

Here take a look at the ads by Nuffnang.com beside this post on the top left of this blog. If you’re lucky, you would have seen some colourful and twinkling advertisement which you can play with. So why do we think an online advertisement would be an evolution concern to ecommerce?

This is because more and more online advertising firms are emerging and making electronic marketing more efficient than before. With interactive media and online advertising merged, we can now see ads almost in every website we surf.

As a conclusion, the prospect of e-commerce is definitely even clearer as compared to the contemporary condition even though some specialist do express some involve over the increasing extension of e-commerce and its power in international trade, import/export and global sourcing.

Sources from:

• http://newmedia.medill.northwestern.edu/courses/nmpspring01/brown/Revstream/history.htm
• http://www.klein.com/dvk/publications/ecommerce.pdf
• http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/history-of-ecommerce-221634.html
• http://www.tc.umn.edu/~vuong002/overview.htm