The History and Evolution of E-commerce

E-commerce this word has becomes well-known in this century, by looking at this word; we will know that it means that any commerce that takes place electronically. It most likely implies that we can do shopping at any place, any leisure time and even in our pajamas. In fact, the history of E-commerce is relatively a short story. It began less than fifty years ago and its humble beginnings look nothing like the kind of electronic business transactions that we see today. It began before personal computer become prevalent and the first key step came from development of EDI, or Electronic Data Interchange was standardized through ASC X12 in 1984, it enables the transferring of large amount of transactions become stable and reliable. The Mosaic web-browser was made available in 1992 and it developed into a downloadable browser, Netscape, which enable user surfing the net in a more simple way. History of ecommerce is unthinkable without Amazon and Ebay which were among the first Internet companies to allow electronic transactions established in 1995.

The evolution of E-commerce has not just gone through a smoothly way, it faced a great challenges in year 2000 which the dot-com collapse led to unfortunate results and many of ecommerce companies disappeared. However, the evolution did not stop because of this breakdown, in a short period, the electronic companies reanimate. By the end of 2001, the largest form of ecommerce, Business-to-Business (B2B) model, had around $700 billion in transactions. Other varieties also growing such as Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) where consumers sell to each other, for example through auction sites and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is another form of e-commerce that allows users to share resources and files directly. Besides Amazon and Ebay, there are many companies such as Dell, Staples, Office Depot and Hewlett Packard also joined to the e-commerce family successfully. Without any doubts, E-commerce play an important role in business in our time, it provides another platform for people making transactions. It really brings a huge convenience to us and the availability of high speed Internet has increased the ability of people to work from home. These two factors encouraged more and more people start to take part in e-commerce. To cut a long story short, there is no mistaken that we said that e-commerce has become a part of our daily lives.