The history and evolution of E-commerce

Internet plays an important role in the evolution of e-commerce, in 1960s, e-commerce appeared through internet; in 1990s, e-commerce took off with the arrival of the World Wide Web and browsers. So, the evolution of e-commerce attributed to a combination regulatory reform and technological innovation.

E-Commerce was developed with innovations like:

• Electronic funds transfer (EFT) - funds can be routed electronically from one organization to another.
• Electronic data interchange (EDI) - used to electronically transfer routine documents that expanded electronic transfers from financial transactions to other types of transaction processing.
• Interorganizational system (IOS) - a system which allows the flow of information to be automated between organizations in order to reach a desired supply-chain management system, which enables the development of competitive organizations.

There have been several key steps in the history of e-commerce.

• EDI --a set of standards developed to exchange business information and do electronic transactions. At the beginning, there are few formats of EDI, companies cannot interact with each others. In 1984 the ASC X 12 standards apply became stable and reliable in transferring large amounts of transactions.

• The development of Digital subscriber line (DSL) -- DSL allowed quicker access and a persistent connection to the Internet.

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

• In early of 2000, merger between AOL and Time Warner. This merging brings together a major online company with a traditional company.

• In February 2000 hackers attacked some major players of e-commerce, including Yahoo, eBay and Amazon. After this incident, the security of electronic commerce has improved.
  

We will see a larger presence by experienced traditional companies, such as Wal-Mart. It shows that companies who take this mixed strategy of having stores online and offline will be successful. It can be seen that there will be a large growth in Business-to-Consumer (B2C). However, even though B2C electronic commerce may be the most recognizable there are different varieties.

Today the largest electronic commerce is Business-to-Business (B2B). Other varieties growing today include Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P)

related link: http://newmedia.medill.northwestern.edu/courses/nmpspring01/brown/Revstream/history.htm