E-Commerce

What is E-commerce?

Electronic Commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, it is the process of buying, selling or exchanging products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. Nowadays, the amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. For example, selling and buying airline tickets through the internet.

The history and evolution of E-commerce

Originally, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). EDI is a set of standards developed in the 1960’s to exchange business information and do electronic transactions. In the beginning, each company had its own standards for formatting these documents. However, in 1979, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) came up with something called ASC X12, a universal standard for sharing business documents over electronic networks.

Although 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. At this time, people began to define the term e-commerce as the process of purchasing of available goods and services over the Internet using secure connections and electronic payment services.

According to all available data, e-commerce sales continued to grow in the next few years. The chart below shows that by the end of 2007, e-commerce sales accounted for 3.4% of total sales.

Undoubtedly, e-commerce will evolve further in the future as it become more and more important to people.

Early adopters of E-commerce

Amazon and eBay are the two companies that transformed e-commerce in the mid-1990s. Amazon went public in 1997 and it has expanded its offerings beyond books. It currently offers music, movies, electronics, toys, home and garden equipment, clothing, jewelry, video games and digital downloads. Furthermore, Amazon runs seven different international Web sites, has distribution and customer service centers in seven countries and employs more than 17,000 people worldwide.

eBay leveled the e-commerce playing field. In 1996, with two full-time employees, eBay sold $7.2 million worth of goods. By 1997, with the help of Beanie Babies frenzy, eBay sold $95 million in goods. In 2007, eBay sold $52.5 billion in auctions, had more than 220 million registered users and 13,000 employees.

Both eBay and Amazon paved the way for today's e-commerce merchant. Nowadays, consumers can buy almost anything online, including shoes, home goods, and others.

Web 2.0

"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. For instance, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies.

Moreover, it allows users to do more than just retrieve information. They can build on the interactive facilities of "Web 1.0" to provide "Network as platform" computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data. The characteristics of Web 2.0 are rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. Further characteristics, such as openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation, can also be viewed as essential attributes of Web 2.0.

Related links:

http://www.ecommerce-land.com/history_ecommerce.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_commerce

http://communication.howstuffworks.com/history-e-commerce1.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0#cite_note-8