The History of E-commerce

What’s e-commerce? It consist of buying and selling goods and services, exchange of ideas through using computer telecommunication networks, of which the internet is one of the such network system. Therefore, e-commerce became possible in 1991when the Internet was opened to commercial used.

E-commerce application seems started after World War 2, around the year of 1948 to 1949. This is because of the blockade of city was under impractical and not often impossible to conduct business in the normal manner by using paper documents. Therefore, the US Army started using telephone, telex and radio-type instead. Credit goes to Edward Guilbert, a logistics officer who devised this first electronic commerce system.

Over the years since then other businesses and organizations also
started using and devising electronic transfer system and by the year 1975, the first general standard was excepted because of the emerge of Electronic Data Interchange standard (EDI) which is universal and flexible enough to handle most of the electronic transaction. However, in the year 1984, The ASC X 12 standard was created in order to deal with EDI. It was also a dependable means of dealing with a large number of transactions at once. Since it severely reduced the potential pandemonium of e-commerce, thereby most of the people deem that was a defining moment for e-commerce.

In year 1994, Marc Andreessen began the creation of a browser by the name of Mosaic which was then adapted into the Netscape browser. It providing users a simple browser to surf the internet and a safe online transaction technology called Secure Sockets Layer.

Moreover, in the year 1995, Amazon.com and eBay.com (which are two of the biggest names in e-commerce) are launched.Besides that, AOL (America Online) and Time Warner announced their merger in January 2000. The fusing of these two companies has a significant impact on the world e-commerce. On the same year of February, many e-commerce titans including Yahoo.com, Amozon.com, But.com and eBay.com were attacked by computer hackers. The attacks raised concerns about the security of shopping online which the industry responded to with obvious security upgrades. Even though, e-commerce was still there to stay. However, in May, there was a moratorium on the taxation of internet sales until year 2005. Some argue that the e-commerce market is a volatile market with many highs and lows is a significant causes concern over government taxation.

As a conclusion, history of e-commerce is a history of a new, virtual world which is evolving according to the customer advantage. It is a world which we are all building together brick by brick, laying a secure foundation for the future generations.