History And Evolution Of E-Commerce

Electronic commerce is a broad concept that includes virtual browsing of goods on sale, selection of goods to buy, and payment methods. Electronic commerce operates on a bona fide basis, without prior arrangements between customers and merchants.
History of ecommerce dates back to the invention of the very old notion of “sell and buy”, electricity, cables, computers, modems, and the Internet.
Originally, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT).
These were both introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically.
From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehouse. The earliest example of many-to-many electronic commerce in physical goods was the Boston Computer Exchange, a marketplace for used computers launched in 1982.
Ecommerce became possible in 1991 when the Internet was opened to commercial use. Since that date thousands of businesses have taken up residence at web sites. The first online information marketplace, including online consulting was likely the American Information Exchange, another pre-Internet online system introduced in 1991.
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) and DSL which allowed rapid access and a persistent connection to the Internet.
In 2000 a great number of business companies in the United States and Western Europe represented their services in the World Wide Web.
By the end of 2001, the largest form of ecommerce, Business-to-Business (B2B) model, had around $700 billion in transactions.
According to all available data, ecommerce sales continued to grow in the next few years and, by the end of 2007, ecommerce sales accounted for 3.4 percent of total sales

When e-commerce first arrived, they were focused primarily on handling transactions and managing catalogs for B2C sites. Vendors are responding by evolving their products into solutions capable of handling a greater portion of the commerce life cycle. The solutions include capabilities for back-end integration, personalization, content management and supplier enablement. For solution providers, this evolution is good news. Better architectures mean more flexibility and integration capabilities, while increased functionality means that you can do more with a single product.
The Web has made online shopping possible for many businesses and individuals, in a broader sense, e-commerce has existed for many years. For decades, banks have been using electronic funds transfer (EFT, also called wire transfer), which are electronic transmissions of account exchange information over private communication networks.

Currently there are 5 largest and most famous worldwide Internet retailers: Amazon,
Dell, Staples, Office Depot and Hewlett Packard. According to statistics, the most popular categories of products sold in the World Wide Web are music, books, computers, office supplies and other consumer electronics.

As a conclusion
E-commerce is a helpful technology take gives the consumer access to business and companies all over the country and the world but with this access there comes a price. Once consumers and businesses realize some of the dangers of e-commerce, there could fewer incidents of identity theft and credit card fraud. Hopefully in the future, these issues can be rectifying.