The history and evolution of E-commerce

Shopping would be one of the most popular activities among the web. It has much allure in it! You can shop at your leisure, anytime, and in your pajamas. Literally anyone can have their pages built to display their specific goods and services.
Dates back to the invention of the very old notion of “selling and buying”, electricity, cables, computers, modems, and the Internet. E-commerce became possible in 1991 when the Internet was opened to commercial use. Since that date thousands of businesses have existed at web sites.

At first, the term e-commerce means the process of execution of commercial transactions electronically with the help of the leading technologies such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) which gave an opportunity for users to exchange business information and do electronic transactions. In the 1960’s EDI allowed companies to send commercial documentation electronically. There was several different EDI formats that business could use, so companies still might not be able to interact with each other.

However, in 1984 the ASC X12 standard became stable and reliable in transferring large amounts of transactions. In 1992 when the Mosaic web-browser was made available, it was the first ‘point and click’ browser. The Mosaic browser was quickly adapted into a downloadable browser, Netscape which allowed easier access to electronic commerce.


Although the Internet began to advance in popularity among the general public in 1994, it took approximately four years to develop the security protocols (for example, HTTP). The development of DSL was another key moment in the development to of e-commerce. DSL allowed quicker access and a persistent connection to the Internet.


The development of Red Hat Linux was also another major step in electronic commerce growth. Linux gave users another choice in a platform other than Windows that was reliable and open-source. Microsoft faced with this competition needed to invest more in many things including electronic commerce.

Napster was an online application used to share music files for free. This application was yet another major step in e-commerce. Many consumers used the site and were dictating what they wanted from the industry. A major merger, in early 2000, between AOL and Time Warner was another major push for electronic commerce. The merger worth $350 million which brought together a major online company with a traditional company.

Today the largest e-commerce is Business-to-Business (B2B). By the end of 2001, its had around $700 billion in transactions. According to all available data, e-commerce sales continued to grow in the next few years and, by the end of 2007, e-commerce sales accounted for 3.4 percent of total sales. Other varieties growing today include Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) where consumers sell to each other through auction sites. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is another form of e-commerce that allows users to share resources and files directly.