Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce. It consists of buying and selling of products or services over the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.
The term e-commerce has evolved significantly for the past 30 years and has come to involve many more things. In the late 1970s, it allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of electronic commerce. From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.
Soon after the popular inception of the World Wide Web in 1994 dealings over the internet began after certain necessary security protocols came into place. The boom in e-commerce happened during what was known as the ‘dot com era’ that occurred between 1988 and 2000 where purchases and sales happened over the internet with concepts such as e-shopping carts and transfer of funds via an electronic medium. Although many such companies went out of business after the dot com crash in 2001, many "brick-and-mortar" retailers recognized that such companies had identified valuable niche markets and began to add e-commerce capabilities to their Web sites.
Successful online retailers include Hewlett Packard computers, Dell, Amazon and a few others and the things that are most commonly traded online are consumer electronics including computers because as far as electronic goods are concerned there is a wider variety available on the web. The earlier barriers that deterred many from taking up e-commerce have been lowered and now it is easier for small proprietors and business concerns to begin trading via the internet. Many sellers like Dell computers also prefer this method as it eliminates the unnecessary cost and inconvenience of having a middle man.
Evolution of e-commerce can be attributed to a combination of regulatory reform and technological innovation. Though Internet which played an important role in evolution appeared in the late 1960s, e-commerce of today took off with the arrival of World Wide Web and browsers in early 1990s. The liberalization of the telecommunications sector and innovations such as optic fiber, DSL etc. (which has helped to expand the volume and capacity of communications) have helped in the process of that rapid growth. As a result the barriers to entry and engage in e-commerce has fallen rapidly. A brief timeline of evolution is as follows:
1984: EDI or electronic data interchange was standardized through ASC X12. This guaranteed that companies would be able to complete transactions with one another reliably.
1990: Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser, Worldwide Web, using a NeXT computer.
1991: NSF lifts restrictions on commercial use of Internet.
1992: Computer serve offers online retail products to its customers. This gives people the first chance to buy things off their computer.
1993: Mosaic browser invented at University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne, is released to public.
1994: Netscape arrived. It released the Navigator browser in October under the code name Mozilla. It providing users a simple browser to surf the Internet and a safe online transaction technology called Secure Sockets Layer.
1995: Two of the biggest names in e-commerce are launched: Amazon.com and eBay.com. It begin aggressively use Internet for commercial Transactions.
1998: DSL or Digital Subscriber Line, provides fast always-on Internet service to subscribers across California. This prompts people to spend more time, and money, online.
1999: Business.com was sold for US $7.5 million, which was purchased in 1997 for US $150,000. The peer-to-peer file sharing software Napster was launched.
2000: The U.S government extended the moratorium on Internet taxes until at least 2005.
2003: Amazon.com had its first year with a full year of profit.
The growth of Internet has a special significance in the growth of e-commerce. It has the potential to involve general people in to the process thereby increasing its reach far beyond large companies.
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