History & Evolution of E-commerce

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce , consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet.

The commercial-oriented sharing of electronic data among computers become achievable in the 1950s with the appear of geographically dispersed computers. However, highly specialized data formats were used, the software applications of a certain producer were not able to communicate with the applications of another producer. In other words, data exchange between the computers that were not running the same software application were hindered.

Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT) was the first expanded use of a form of electronic commerce appeared in the early 1970s. This enabled banks and financial institutions to transfer large amounts of money either among themselves or with associated businesses.

In the late 1970s Electronic Data Exchange (EDI) was introduced. EDI enables inter-company exchanges of documents, such as order forms for suppliers, invoices, customs forms, stock inventories etc. This has reduced costs both on the producers’ side and on the distributors’ side. Whereas, the high costs of its implementation and the difficulty of making the various versions of EDI fully compatible causes EDI not largely use in the market.

In the late 1980s electronic mail (e-mail) and groupware were widely use in the business world.The two systems were considered a major breakthrough when they first introduced.

When public allowed access to the internet in 1991 a significant change for e-commerce occurred. The internet provides several advantages over its competitors. First, this opened the possibility of accessing huge new markets for every business thinkable. Second, compatibility problems did not exist in the internet, the transfer control protocol / internet protocol (TCP/IP) is the generally accepted standard protocol.

The internet was quickly accepted in business once opened for commercial utilization, internet-related business prosper and the market itself expanded.Recently how to conduct sensible financial transactions on an open access network is the greatest challenge for those companies that run commercial activities through the internet.

The World Wide Web, which appear in the years when the internet was liberalized, rendered e-commerce more accessible and more affordable. The Web provides the internet its user-friendly interface. Ttherefore, the Web has profoundly changed the way the information on the internet organized, presented and accessed.

Instead, the information of the Web consists of a series of documents called web pages which are developed by using the Hypertext Markup language ( HTML). The main characteristic is that it allows the creation of hypertextual links within a web page which let users “jump” directly to another web page or some other information source.

In the early times of the Web, these pages were static documents that consisted only text and images. Currently the content had become more and more attractive. The HTML language lets users embed in the web page different types of “objects”, such as multimedia files, which could be video clips, animation, sound and music.

The Web is a more affordable means of conducting electronic commerce than the EDI. In addition, it enables a wide range of commercial activities.Taking advantages of the low costs involved, many small businesses are now able to compete with big corporations.

History of ecommerce is unthinkable without Amazon and Ebay which were among the first Internet companies to allow electronic transactions. Currently there are 5 largest and most famous worldwide Internet retailers: Amazon, Dell, Staples, Office Depot and Hewlett Packard. According to statistics, the most popular categories of products sold in the World Wide Web are music, books, computers, office supplies and other consumer electronics.