Yesterday is History, Today is Revolutionary, and Tomorrow is a Mystery. (History And Evolution of E-commerce)

The ever prospering technique of dealing with routine transactions on the internet, e-commerce, is working its way up in the world as one of the most widely embraced technological gateway to operate economic exchange activities. The word “e-commerce” itself is abbreviated. Initially, it was known as electronic commerce. The utterance “commerce” is defined as: trade, especially between countries; the buying and selling of goods and services. Thus, e-commerce simply means trading activities online. E-commerce was founded over a few decades ago, by Michael Aldrich. It was used extensively by Ford, Peugeot-Talbot, General Motors and Nissan.



1. Originally, electronic commerce was preordained for 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.


2. Next, it is the development of Mosaic web-browser in 1992. This web browser was soon given the form of a browser which could be downloaded and was named as Netscape. This further broadened the scope and possibility of electronic commercial transaction.

3. Subsequently, the birth of DSL was another key moment in the growth to of e-commerce. DSL allowed quicker access and a persistent connection to the Internet.

4. Christmas of 1998 was another major step in the expansion of e-commerce. AOL had sales of 1.2 billion over the 10 week holiday season from online sales.

5. Soon, the creation of Red Hat Linux was also another major step in electronic commerce escalation. Linux gave users another choice in a platform other then Windows that was reliable and open-source.

4. Consequently, a major merger, in early 2000, between AOL and Time Warner was another great push for electronic commerce. The merger, worth $350 million, brought together a major online company with a traditional company.


5. Today, the largest electronic commerce is Business-to-Business (B2B). Businesses involved in B2B sell their goods to other businesses. In 2001, this form of e-commerce had around $700 billion in transactions. Other varieties growing today include Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) where consumers sell to each other, for example through auction sites. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is another form of e-commerce that allows users to share resources and files directly. Thus, continually, more and more businesses on the globe are adopting e-commerce to trade because of its convenient element as well as other advantages.


By the way, it wasn’t all smooth-sailing for e-commerce since its stone age. During the twentieth century, hackers attacked some major players of e-commerce, including Yahoo, Ebay and Amazon. In the light of these attacks the need for improved security came to the forefront in the development of electronic commerce.

In my opinion, e-commerce had evolved so much since Aldrich because it has provided a very competitive and value adding trading system. Nowadays, e-commerce does not deal with tangible products only, but intangible as well. For example, people can be trading information, knowledge, electronic work of art, digital products and etc.

In the coming days, users will definitely demand more from e-commerce, and perhaps, it will progress until the extend where it actually possesses all the benefits of a physical storefront trading and eliminating all current drawbacks of e-commerce.

Last but not least, Web 2.0 has enhanced e-commerce tremendously. The term "Web 2.0" was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999, this was depicted in her article "Fragmented Future". "Web 2.0" refers to what is perceived as a second generation of web development and web design. It is characterized as facilitating communication, information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. It has led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and web applications. Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. For further information, we have provided a website that shows journals on Web 2.0: http://web2.sys-con.com/