The History and Evolution of E-commerce

Electronic commerce (E-commerce) is a process of buying and selling products or services or information over the computer networks. It is a technology mediated exchange between an individuals or organizations. Before the e-commerce being developed, it has been gone through several steps of development and evolution.

Initially, there are not much people having computer. Thus, only cash, check and credit card being used in the daily transaction. E-commerce was started in the early 1970s which allows organizations to transfer funds between one another electronically. Then, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been developed to exchange the business information and do electronic transactions. However, most of the company still unable to interact with each other as there was several different EDI formats that a business could use. Beside that, it is costly and complex to administer for the small business. Thus, EDI not widely accepted. ASC X12 standard has been introduced in 1984. It is more stable and reliable in transferring large amounts of transactions.

In 1992, the Mosaic web-browser was made available. It was the first ‘point and click’ browser. After that, Mosaic browser was adapted into a downloadable browser, Netscape which allow access to E-commerce easily. It provides the users a simple browser to surf the Internet and a safe online transaction technology known as Secure Sockets Layer. Amazon.com and eBay were then launched.

Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) which was another development of E-commerce after that moment. It allowed quicker access and persistent connection to the internet. This has encouraged people to spend more time online. Then, another major step in E-commerce growth was the Red Hat Linux. It has given the users another choice in a platform other then Windows.

Other than that, AOL (known as online software suite) and Napster were also the major development of the E-commerce. In early 2000, AOL and Time Warner merge and they push for the E-commerce. At that time, many people start to make transaction through E-commerce. This is because people are educated and the living standard has been increase. Hence, more people own computer. Beside that, it is more convenient as the users’ only need to sit at home and all the transaction can be done.

Nowadays, the largest E-commerce is Business to Business (B2Ba). This form of E-commerce had around $700 billion transactions in 2001 by selling their goods to other businesses. It has increase from year to year. The other forms of E-commerce which are growing include Consumer to Consumer (C2C) and Peer to Peer (P2P). In future, there will be more and more people and organization using E-commerce as technology become more advance.