The History And Evolution of E-commerce

It is not surprising that E-commerce is the outcome of fast changes in the global nature of the technology. Electronic commerce called as e-commerce(EC) consists of the buying, selling, exchanging products or services ,or information via internet or others computer networks. It's one of the wonders of the technological world.Let us briefly glide through the historic events that took place which led to the evolution of E-Commerce.

To start with, in the year 1970s, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), was standardized to allow businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. In 1992, online retail products were being provided to its customers by CompuServe. This great revolution bought the first chance ever for the people to purchase things through the computer, thus making the lifestyle of the people a lot easier and trendy. Netscape arrived in 1994 which was very user friendly and offered users the option of surfing the internet through a single browser. Also, it provided Secure Sockets Layer which was a safe online transaction technology.

So, from that day onwards, fun was away from just a click of the mouse. When the Internet became commercialized and popular worldwide around 1994, users and companies began offers their services through the World Wide Web. Then in 1995, the current biggest names in the E-Commerce industry which are eBay.com and Amazon.com were launched. It was a major factor for such an unprecedented growth of E-Commerce industry.

The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. Internet which integrates the computer and telecommunication technology has revolutionized the way communication is carry on daily. The internet allows information to spin around the world at an ever faster rate in large quantities for cheap. The arrival of the internet revolution is indeed a good news to small businesses, and medium enterprises (SME). It brings equal opportunity to all firms to access to the international market.

E-commerce is the way of the future. E-commerce is an emerging industry following the same development the pattern that the automobile industry experienced 100 years ago, only faster. The sites like Amazon.com was honored as the earth’s largest book store resulting in more than 1.2 billion dollars sales in just 10 weeks of holiday season shopping alone with more than 3 million shoppers hooked to that site. Even online air ticketing industry is making more than 20 billion dollars every year. Thus, E-Commerce has really emerged as a huge industry over the past few years standing up to the expectations of many. Let us continue to see the success and failure of e-commerce.

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