The History & Evolution of E-commerce

What is E-commerce?

Definition ·History & Evolution ·Video·Issues

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The definition of E-commerce

First, Commerce is interpreted as all forms of trade and services that assist trading which deals with the exchange of goods and services from producer to the final consumer. Every era of business yields new strategies and new methods of doing business. With the advent of information technology, people able buying, selling, transferring, or exchanging products, services, and/or information via computer networks and Internet, this is known as electronic commerce (E-commerce).

E-commerce can be classified by the nature of the transactions or the interactions among participan ts such as business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), consumer-to-business (C2B), and so on. In B2B, all the participants are either businesses or other organizations. For instance, Niki and Dell involve B2B with their suppliers. On the other hand, the typical example of B2C is where the individual shoppers purchase their desired books at Amazon.com.

History & Evolution of E-commerce

In the late 1970s, e-commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically by using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These allow businesses to send commercial documents and information such as orders' lists or invoices electronically.

In 1980s, the invention and high level acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking were formed further meaning of e-commerce.

In addition, e-commerce is also includes enterprise resource planning system (ERP), data mining and data warehousing started since 1990s. Even though the Internet was famous in world wide in 1994, it took about five years to develop the security protocols e.g. HTTp and DSL. These allowed rapid access and a persistent connection to the Internet.

In 2000, a huge number of business companies United States and Western Europe provided their services through World Wide Web. Due to the revolution, people started to relate e-commerce with the ability of purchasing various products and services through the Internet using secure protocols and electronic payment services.

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Issues about E-commerce

E-commerce offers pros and cons to organizations, individual customers and society. Particularly, consumers can shop any time at any place. Also, consumers have large selection to choose from suppliers, products and styles. By surfing the Internet, they able to make comparison among the products and shop for the lowest price. In the same vein, business world becomes larger and more competitive.

The increased of competition has caused the product differentiation. Many similar products were invented creatively with the same general function, but are still unique. Thus, individual shoppers will face difficulties in making products comparison. In conclusion, as there are limited information provided, the competition may be not as high and price may not be lower because it is depend on their targeted market on which design or features they provide to their targeted customers.

Prepeared by Carrie Hon.