E-commerce Series – Part 1
Hi All,
Greetings for the day 🙂 Lets explore the eCommerce
What is E- Commerce ?
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet.
Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.
Lets keep aside what is going on for the time being and dive it in history.
Electronic Data Interchanges and teleshopping in the 1970s paved the way for the modern day eCommerce store. The history of eCommerce is closely intertwined with the history of the internet.
Online shopping was invented and pioneered in 1979 by Michael Aldrich in the United Kingdom. He connected a modified domestic television via a telephone line to a real-time multi-user transaction processing computer. The system was marketed beginning in 1980 and offered mainly business-to-business systems that were sold in the UK, Ireland, and Spain.
One of the earliest consumer shopping experiences was Book Stacks Unlimited, an online bookstore created by Charles M. Stack in 1992. Stack’s store began as a dial-up bulletin board two years before Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos.
In 1994, Book Stacks Unlimited moved to the Internet as Books.com and was eventually acquired by Barnes & Noble.
First online Transaction : The first online transaction was, by some reports, marijuana sold by Stanford students to MIT students via the Arpanet account at their artificial intelligence lab in 1972. However, the first online shopping transaction on the Internet took place some 22 years later. With the headline “The Internet is Open”, the August 12, 1994, issue of New York Times chronicled the sale between two friends of a Sting CD.
The Times said, “The team of young cyberspace entrepreneurs celebrated what was apparently the first retail transaction on the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy.”
Initial hiccups in Ecommerce :From the beginning, there were many hesitations and concerns with online shopping but the development of a security protocol – the Secure Socket Layers (SSL) – encryption certificate by Netscape in 1994 provided a safe means to transmit data over the Internet. Web browsers were able to check and identify whether a site had an authenticated SSL certificate and based on that, could determine whether or not a site could be trusted, Now, SSL encryption protocol is a vital part of web security and version 3.0 has become the standard for most web servers today
First Professional commercial Ecommerce Site :
From the mid-nineties there were major advancements in the commercial use of the Internet. One of the first eCommerce sites was Amazon which launched in 1995 as an online bookstore and has grown to be the largest online retailer in the world. With no physical selling location, it was able to offer internet consumers an almost unlimited range of books, many of which would be hard to find in local book shops. Its success was almost instantaneous
Amazon was one of the first online retailers to add user reviews with a rating scale to for products. Customer reviews are now considered the most effective social media tactic for driving sales
Other eCommerce marketplace success stories include Ebay, an online auction site that debuted in 1995 and received huge commercial success after Amazon.
Thanks for reading 🙂 Feel free to discuss / comment / questions 🙂 SHARING IS CARING 🙂
