History and evolution of ecommerce

Electronic commerce dates back to the creation of the very old concept of “sell and buy”, electricity, cables, computers, modems, and the Internet.The electronic commerce has changed over the last 30 years. Originally, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology 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. These were both introduced in the late 1970s year, businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders electronically. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) in the 1980s were also forms of electronic commerce. From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include entreprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehouse.

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 Excharge, 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. By the end of 2001, the largest form of ecommerce, Business-to-Business (B2B) model, had around $700 billion in transactions.

Based on the date, a quick glimpse at the data promises much more evolution in the years to come. Forrester Research, for example, predicted American firms alone would sell US$316 billion in goods and services via the Web by 2010. That figure would more than double 2004's online spending to account for some 12 percent of all retail sales, up from about 7 percent today. Indeed, e-commerce has evolved from online billboards to a fully functional, personalized shopping experience over the past decade. While there were admittedly a few bumps along the road, the path from 1994 through the 2004 holiday shopping season is full of crucial milestones of Internet pioneers and technology innovators.