Digital Commerce (History of ecommerce)

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History of ecommerce

Posted by Miva Merchant to articles on October 26th, 2011

Ecommerce or electronic commerce, is the buying and selling of products or services via the Internet.

Ecommerce was introduced 40 years ago and, to this day, continues to grow with new technologies, innovations, and thousands of businesses entering the online market each year.  The convenience, safety, and user experience of ecommerce has improved exponentially since its inception in the 1970’s.

1960-1982

Paving the way for electronic commerce was the development of the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).  EDI replaced traditional mailing and faxing of documents with transfer of data from one computer to another.  Trading partners could transfer orders, invoices and other business transactions using a data format that met the ANSI ASC X12, the predominant set of standards in North America.  Once an order is sent, it is then examined by VAN (Value-Added Network) and finally directed to the recipient’s order processing system. EDI allowed the transfer of data seamlessly without any human intervention.

In 1979 Micheal Aldrich connected a television set to a transaction processing computer with a telephone line and created what he coined, :teleshopping:, meaning shopping at a distance.

1982-1990

In 1982, France launched the precursor to the Internet called, Minitel.  The Minitel was free to telephone subscribers and connected millions of users to a computing network.

By 1999, over 9 million Minitel terminals had been distributed and were connecting approximately 25 million users in this interconnected network of machines.  The Minitel system peaked in 1991 and slowly met its demise after the success of the Internet 3 years later.  In 2011, France Telecom announced its shutdown of the Minitel service system.

90’s To Present

In 1990 Tim Berners Lee, along with his friend Robert Cailliau, published a proposal to build a “Hypertext project” called, “Worldwide Web”.  The inspiration for this project was modeled after the Dynatex SGMl reader licensed by CERN.

The Same year Lee, using a NeXtcomputer the first web server and wrote the first web browser.  Shortly therafter, he went on to debut the web on Aug 6,1991 as a publicly available service on the Internet. When Berner’s Lee decided he would take on the task of marrying hypertext to the Internet, in doing that, the process led to him developing URL, HTML and HTTP.

 (http://www.miva.com/blog/the-history-of-ecommerce-how-did-it-all-begin)

Online Ecommerce Megastores

In the mid-nineties to 2000’s major advancements in the commercial use of the Internet. The largest online retailer in the world Amazon, launched in 1995 as an online bookstore.

The dot com bubble was Ebay, an online auction site that debuted in 1995. Other retailers like Zappos and Victoria Secret followed suit with online shopping sites;  Zappos being a web only operation.

Also in 1995, was the inception of Yahoo followed by Google in 1998, two leading search engines in the US. These successful web directories began their own ecommerce subsidiaries with Google Shopping and Yahoo! Auction, in following years.

As more and more people began doing business online, a need for secure communication and transactions became apparent. In 2004, the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI) was formed to ensure businesses were meeting compliance with various security requirements.

http://www.miva.com/blog/the-history-of-ecommerce -how-did-it-all-begin