History Of Electronic Commerce

History

Electronic Commerce also known as e-Commerce by most has been rapidly growing in worldwide sales ever since it was introduced almost forty years ago in the late 1970s. Today electronic commerce is a trillion dollar industry that is still rapidly growing and increasing in worldwide sales. Electronic commerce wouldn't be where it is today if not for the contribution of its innovators and pioneers.

In the year 1972, ARPANET was smartly taken advantaged of and was used to make sales transactions between students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and students of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. After some time, it was depicted as the "The seminal act of e-commerce" (Markoff/2006). ARPANET was a wide area network

Some even say that Michael Aldrich was the true inventor of online shopping or e-commerce.

Thomson Holidays UK is an organization that provides holiday experiences and in 1981, it was the first business-to-business (B2B) online shopping system that was introduced via the Electronic Data Exchange.

In 1984, Tesco, a multinational grocery store, created the first business-to-consumer (B2C) online shopping system via the Electronic Data Exchange.

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, which completely redefined the way online shopping works. With the World Wide Web being open to the masses and getting more and more popular day by day expeditiously, an organization called Book Stacks Unlimited capitalized on this new platform in 1992 by establishing the first ever commercialized website selling books through the world wide web, allowing payments by credit cards (Soeder/1998).

In 1995, Amazon the first commercial-free 24 hour website was launched by Jeff Bezos, which then on became one of the largest and most profitable electronic commerce companies in the globe.

It covers a range of business types, from online auction to online retail stores to online movie sites to businesses trading goods and services to one another. "Going online" or making e-Commerce available to the public will boost an organization performance as it would improve customer service to a certain degree, increase profitability and market share, gaining a wider audience and delivering items faster. e-Commerce is not just about buying and selling online, it is also about electronic communication with stakeholders and other important people to the organization. In short, electronic commerce is not just about transactions but enhancing communications and transactions with the organizations stakeholders. Electronic Commerce is also very safe to conduct transactions if the company at hand is doing things right, security is very tight when it comes to money exchanges. All e-Commerce based organizations that want to make a profit, do exchanges or communicate has to conduct it through the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or the Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). The Electronic Data Interchange is a method of electronic communication that exchanges data electronically and is usually used between businesses. It is so much easier as it sends information electronically rather than using a paper to mail, fax or even send someone personally to deliver it, unlike