The history and evolution of E-commerce

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The meaning of electronic commerce has changed over the last 30 years. Originally, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of electronic commerce. From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction's lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.

The Internet has changed the way consumers and businesses conduct transactions. Because the web is such a dynamic medium, first generation web sites have quickly given way to dynamic and interactive e-commerce sites that incorporate the 7 C's of next generation web sites.
When e-commerce platforms first arrived, they were focused primarily on handling transactions and managing catalogs for B2C sites. Of course, businesses are looking for much more than that today. They need software solutions that support a broader range of e-business requirements.

Vendors are responding by evolving their products into solutions capable of handling a greater portion of the commerce life cycle. The solutions include capabilities for back-end integration, personalization, content management and supplier enablement. For solution providers, this evolution is good news. Better architectures mean more flexibility and integration capabilities, while increased functionality means that you can do more with a single product.