History of eCommerce

Most people don’t realize that e‐commerce and its underlying technology have been around for about forty years. The term e‐commerce was originally conceived top describe the process of conducting business transactions electronically using technology from the Electronic Data Interchange [EDI] and

Electronic Funds Transfer [EFT].EDI is widely viewed as the beginning of E‐commerce. Large organizations have been investing in development of EDI since sixties. It has not gained reasonable acceptance until eighties. EDI is a set of standards developed in the 1960’s to exchange business information and do electronic transactions. At first there were several different EDI formats that business could use, so companies still might not be able to interact with each other. Electronic Data interchange [EDI] allowed different companies to perform electronic dealings with one another.

The internet was conceived in 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency [a Department of Defense Organization] funded research of computer networking. The Internet could end up like EDI without the emergence of World Wide Web in 1990s.The web became a popular mainstream medium (perceived as the fourth mainstream medium in addition to print, radio and TC) in a speed, which had never seen before. The web users and contents were increasing at an accelerated rate. Besides the availability of technical infrastructures, the popularity of the web is largely attributed to the low cost access and simplicity of HTML authoring, which are the obstacles of EDI Development. The Internet and the Web have overcome the technical difficulty of EDI, but it has not solved the problem of slow development of E‐commerce standards.

XML, as a Meta Markup Language, provides a development tool for defining format of data interchange in a wide variety of business communities. Web services offer a flexible and effective architecture for the implementation. There is no doubt that XML and the web services will shape the course of E‐commerce in the years to come.

The next important phase in the History of E‐commerce was the development of Mosaic Web browser in 1992.The Web Browser was soon given the form of a browser which could be downloaded and was named as Netscape.

The next important milestone in e‐commerce was the development of Napster. Napster was an online application used to share music files for free. Many consumers used the site and were dictating what they wanted from the Industry. Napster allowed people to download music from the Internet for free.

The development and adaptation of DSL and Red hat Linux respectively, again benefited the process of online business transaction. The year 2000, saw a major merge between AOL and Time Warner which marked another important step towards the development of E‐commerce.

The World wide popularity of Internet has resulted in the stable development and overwhelming acceptance of E‐Commerce. E‐Commerce provides with a rich online transaction experience. Business to Business is the largest E‐Commerce in the present time. Peer to Peer and Consumer to Consumer are two important types of E‐Commerce.