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From early stages to multi-million dollar industry |
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Written by Webmaster
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Saturday, 01 May 2010 |
By ColderICE
 business! According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 66% Americans have purchased a product online and 93% have used e-commerce activities such as researching and bidding.
Internet has changed the world, becoming a trendy time-saver and a resourceful way to find and compare virtually any kind of item and service; with e-commerce, it has changed the way we buy. You can shop in your pajamas, don't have to drive to the mall or physically move from shop to shop and wait in line at the register... Remember those times?
E-commerce history dates back to the invention of the old notion of "sell and buy", electricity, cables, computers, modems and the Internet; although most people don't realize that e-commerce was originally conceived to facilitate business transactions - not personal transactions - using a technology called Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), developed in the 1970's, that allowed business to electronically exchange things like purchase orders and invoices. The 1970's also brought the 'Electronic Fund Transfers' (EFT) that allowed payments to be processed online. The EFT and EDI were the enabling technologies that laid the ground
work for e-commerce, and have been around for 40 years.
Actual online purchasing didn't come into place until 1979. It was invented in Great Britain by Michael Aldrich. Jane Snowball, from Gateshead, England has the honor of being the first person to make an online purchase.
Public electronic commerce became possible in 1991 when the Internet was opened to commercial use. But it wasn't until 1994 that it really began to accelerate, with the introduction of security protocols and high speed internet connections. The definition of e-commerce began to change in 2000, the year of the infamous dot-com collapse, when thousands of internet businesses folded; these "first mover" failures served their yet-offline competitors very well, providing evidence of what not to do in building a viable online business.
Sales figures for 2008 were somewhere in the area of $204 billion and now account for nearly 4% of total sales worldwide. Even with a slumping global economy, online retail sales continue to rise.
E-Commerce has grown so much that consumers can easily search through a large database of products and services, see actual prices, sizes and styles, build an order over several days and even email it as a "wishlist" hoping that someone will pay for it.
Online vendors also have a wide variety of advantages - which have increased even more since the evolution of social networks, bookmarks and video sites. The web and its search engines provide a way to be found without expensive advertising campaign. Web technology also allows to track customer preferences and to deliver individually-tailored marketing.
Currently, Amazon, Dell, Staples, Office Depot and HP are the 5 largest and most famous worldwide Internet retailers. There's so much credit to be given to companies such as eBay and Amazon, which really began to lead the way in e-commerce... one can just wonder, what's to come?
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 01 May 2010 )
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