A Brief History of e-Commerce
e-Commerce, the practice of buying, selling and marketing of goods or services over an electronic medium, has been around a lot longer then simply since the internet. Ever since the invention of computers and computer networking, e-commerce has been around in one form or another.
In the early days, e-commerce was conducted over private networks called Value Added Networks (or VANs) in the form of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Technically EDI wasn’t true e-commerce as we know it today. EDI was basically limited to being used as a form to pass information between two or more companies. There were drawbacks to this format too; both companies needed to subscribe to the same VAN, the format of messages that could be sent was heavily regulated, and the exchange of money took place outside of the VAN/EDI arena. However EDI was an important step in realizing e-commerce.
It wouldn’t be until the early to mid-90’s that e-commerce as we have come to understand it came into existence. To get to e-commerce, the public first needed a reliable public network they could use for transactions; this was of course the internet. With the internet it became possible to market, sell and purchase goods and services electronically. Initially e-commerce was a small portion of the type of interactions conducted over the internet, but as technology and reliability of the internet improved it became more common and economical.
Soon e-commerce began to be seen as the ultimate way to make money on the internet. Companies went on a frenzy developing ways to make money on the internet. Unfortunately most of these ideas were not built upon sound business models and this led to the internet bust of early 2001.
Today more and more people are spending an increasing percentage of their budget online. This trend seems to have no end in sight. Even though the internet appears to be saturated with e-stores, I am certain we are still at its infancy. New never-before-thought-of niches will be discovered; more people will come online; more people will make online shopping a preference. Now is a great time to jump into e-commerce.
