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History of Ecommerce
Ecommerce 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 (24/7).
The process of advancement in Information Technology to evolve into a business transaction is the ecommerce history.
During prehistoric period before invention of electricity, transactions of all the business were done face to face or via letters. Later on this was substituted by telegraph, telephones and in mid 1980’s by fax machines. As large companies invested vastly in researching in order to develop more reliable electronic means of transaction, old technology was replaced by new technologies that were more consistent and spread much faster than the previous technology.
To interchange data and to carry out business deals electronically in 1960’s Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) was formulated.
Initially ecommerce was facilitating business transactions electronically mostly using technology such as EDI (electronic data interchange) and EFT (electronic funds transfer) to send business documents such as purchase orders or invoices. Previously in 1970’s and 1980’s it also involved data analysis.
Lets have a look into how gradual technical development attributed to the growth of ecommerce:
* In general the first business deal carried out on telephone or via a fax is mainly considered as first ecommerce 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.
* In 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.
* In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee developed World Wide Web at CERN that started the first Internet transaction. These technology supported exchange of data that was in text format only.
* Later in 1993, Mosiac was developed by Marc Andreessen, this is the first graphic web browser launched to interchange text and graphics and loads of people started downloading it.
* Netscape the most successful graphic browser was later developed by Marc Andreessen. On the other hand, Microsoft came up with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
* The first business deal took place in 1994 and since then there have been billions of dealings.
* Later in 1998 DSL was launched into the market that provided much faster access and persistent connection to the internet.
* In 1998, AOL swamped the market and had about 1.2 billion sales over a period of 10 weeks from online sales.
* Ecommerce spread to a significant group globally within a span of 4 years from 1996 to 2000.
* Another major improvement in ecommerce came with the development of Linux a platform more reliable and open source that allowed itself to be customized by its users and put a tough competition to Microsoft that compelled it develop much better versions of networking.
* Amazon and EBay were the first International companies that implemented electronic transactions. Initial public offerings by Netscape, Amazon, and EBay had tremendous success and almost every one started implementing business on internet.
Conclusion
As the websites grew the importance of internet today is thousands of times what it was only a decade ago. ECommerce is a new form of business that has developed rapidly. It provides a different mode of doing business that helps reduce labour cost and much faster transaction. Today most of the business transaction is performed online and this also has a great impact on other industries such as banking but the only concern is privacy.