Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The history and evolution of E-commerce

Before e-commerce has been introduced, business has made by face-to-face or via letters. Later on, it is modernized by the technology to the usage of telephone, telegraph and even fax machine to deal with their clients.

The basic e-commerce plan is electronic data interchange (EDI) and electronic funds transfer (EFT) have been invented. These methods were introduced in the late 1970s. These allow businesses to speed up the process by sending commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices, electronically. As the time goes by, EDI and EFT have created the expansion and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking.
The examples of the growth in e-commerce are the airline reservation system and the online shopping system which were invented in UK in 1979 by Micheal Aldrich.

During the 1980s, automobile manufacturers such as Ford, Peugeot-Talbot, General Motors and Nissan started adopting e-commerce and in 10 years time, e-commerce has included theories like enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

The example of a successful company who first use e-commerce is Boston Computer Exchange. It was first created in 1982 and the company dominated electronic trading in used computers in the US in the 1980s.

These are some of the achievement in the history of e-commerce:
  • Year 1994, Pizza Hut offered pizza ordering on its webpage, the first online bank opened and etc.
  • Year 1995, Amazon.com was launched and companies like Dell and Cisco began to use internet for commercial transactions aggressively.
  • Year 1998, electronic postal stamps could be purchased and downloaded for printing in from the web.
  • Year 1999, peer-to-peer file sharing software Napster launched.
  • Year 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion.
  • Year 2003, Amazon.com posted first yearly profit.
  • Year 2008, US e-commerce and online retail sales projected to reach $204 billion, an increasing of 17% over 2007.

In time, e-commerce is still widely growing and will be more successful in the future.

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