The History & evolution of E-Commerce

Do you remember buying airline tickets before the Internet?

Can you imagine buying a new computer or car without doing hours of Web research?

How about Chinese New Year shopping? You would actually have to step into the shopping mall.

Now, this may not be a MUST anymore.

E-Commerce (which means electronic commerce), is usually defined as the conduct of business online, via electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. Nowadays, millions of people are involved in e-commerce on the Internet, for example, they visit world wide web sites to buy books, order foods, or check their bank accounts. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage.

To know more about electronic commerce, we would have to drawn back to 30 years ago. At first, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, which uses technology such as Electronic Data Interchange(EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer(EFT). These technologies were both introduced in the late 1970s, which allowed businesses to send commercial documents, such as the company's purchase order or invoices electronically.

In 1980, the growth and acceptance of credit cards, ATM and telephone banking were also forms of electronic commerce. Meanwhile, another form of e-commerce was the airline reservation system.

While, online shopping was invented in the UK in 1979 by Micheal Aldrich and it was used extensively particularly by those auto-mobile manufacturers during the 1980s, such as Ford, Peugeot-Talbot, General Motors and Nissan.

From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include ERP systems, data mining and data warehousing.

In 1994, Pizza Hut start offers pizza ordering on its Web page. While, some companies attempts to offer flower delivery and magazine subscriptions online.

During 1995, Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com and the first commercial-free 24 hour, internet-only radio stations, Radio HK and NetRadio had start broadcasting. Besides that, Dell and Cisco begin to aggressively use Internet for their daily commercial transactions. Moreover, eBay is founded by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar, which now becomes a famous online Auction Web.

And by the end of 2000, a lot of European and American business companies offered their services through the World Wide Web. Since then people start to associate a word "e-commerce" with the ability of purchasing various goods through the Internet using secure protocols and electronic payment services.