An introduction to e commerce and the history of e commerce

Introduction to e commerce

There have been of late, many different methods of trading and e commerce is the latest that jumps into the bandwagon of the effective trading methods. E commerce or electronic commerce is the name given to the trade that is carried out with the help of any electronic media namely the internet or the World Wide Web. With the advancements in technology, there have been a number of augmentations in almost every field and so has the trading industry. Both buying and selling of goods are possible over the internet. After the internet has carved a niche in the field of trading, it is the turn of the mobile phones to play their part in the embellishment of the industry. Thus the definition of e commerce having it that it is one of the most powerful means of business promotion.

Definition of e commerce

E commerce can thus be defined as the buying and selling of goods over the internet and the term e commerce is often used interchangeably with the term e business. The term e-tailing is used when there is retail selling coming about.

The sole aim of e commerce is that to keep the business free from scuffles and tussles. All the trader has to do is to catch the eye of the consumer by the manifold graphic methods and convince them of their company being trustworthy and keep their word. One of the significant advantages as per the definition of e commerce is that there is no barrier in the distance and its cost efficiency. E commerce has also gained the trust of the internet giants like Google as they have entered into the e commerce business. There are different types of e commerce namely, business to business where a company deals with the other for the exchanging of goods and services, business to customer where the company has its goods sold to the customer, consumer to business where a customer or consumer works on a product and a company bus it and the last type of e commerce is the consumer to consumer which is more like auctioning where one consumer bids and another buys.

E commerce not only involves the use of the internet but also through other electronic media like e mail, fax and telephones. This involved the sending of e mails to the companies and consumers providing the details about the products and their specialty. This, more or less is a form of an advertisement but free of cost. However, this when done more than the permitted level is viewed as a junk mail thus not reaching the consumer. The new trend of the season is the opt-in e-mail in which the users of the web themselves sign up voluntarily and receive e mails that contain ads about the products of a particular company.

History of e commerce

The history of e commerce can be dated back to the days of invention of electronics, electricity and the invention of the World Wide Web. But it can rightly be said that it came into existence in the year 1991 after the internet became usable for the commercial purposes. Since then there has been no looking back for the e commerce and there have been many e commerce websites that have been evolving for the trading purposes.

The e commerce involved the usage of the technologies like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer for the commercial transactions using which the users can exchange business information and perform electronic transactions. Exchange of business data in an easily understood format is called the EDI and anteceded the internet of today. The information was exchanged only between the organizations that knew each other well and there are arrangements made for the dial up connection. In the coming years, the EDI is expected to be replaced by XML formats like ebXML. In the 1980's there was an intensification of the credit cards, ATMs and telephone banking. These marked the beginning of e commerce. And in the early 90's there were enterprise resource planning, data warehousing and data mining. Though the internet was quite popular in the early days, there weren't enough security protocols which were developed at later stages in 1994. This was a time when the history of e commerce reach ed newheights and these security protocols permitted the easy, rapid and persistent access of the internet. There was web browser developed in the year 1992 called the mosaic browser which could be downloaded and was named Netscape. The history of e commerce had broadened after the invention of this browser.

Later years in the history of the e commerce

By the year 2000, there were many companies in the Unites States which got involved in e commerce for the promotion of their businesses. The western parts of Europe too had gained much advantage of this system of trading and all of them began their first ever underlying websites for e commerce. There was a huge change in the definition of e commerce when the most successful enterprises of the world had involved in e commerce. Since then e commerce emerged as one of the best forms of trading.

B2B e commerce definition

After the definition of e commerce in general it was the turn of b2b e commerce definition that had the most importance as it was a largely followed e commerce techniques since the beginning. There were a number of companies who after discovering the round the clock stint of the Web had begun to sell their products to other companies so that they may reach the target customers more easily. This was when there was a new B2B e commerce definition put forth.