E Commerce

Introduction to E-commerce 


The age of Industrial Revolution seemed to evolve into a more advanced technological age, the age of Digital Revolution. The concept shifts from the traditional industry to a more complex of interrelated systems of information through digital technology. One of the clear manifestations of the new age is the emergence of electronic commerce (abbreviated, E-commerce) as a novel approach to carry out business in a virtual world.

E-commerce definition

E-commerce is defined as the "modern business methodology that addresses the needs of organizations, merchants, and consumers to cut costs while improving the quality of goods and services and increasing the speed of service delivery, by using internet" (Goel, 2007). It is different from the traditional system of doing business and commerce in a way that the process is done through the internet. As such, it largely minimizes, even sometimes completely eliminates, the need for physical (e.g. vis-à-vis) communication. Since more and more people around the world are using computer and internet, e-commerce is gaining rapid popularity globally. E-commerce makes buying and selling of products and services possible at any place and time.

Brief history of E-commerce

When the internet started out in the late 1960s, more and more applications have surfaced. One of them is the World Wide Web in the 1990s. The contraption of World Wide Web, together with the more advanced devices, tools, interfaces, browsers, and software applications, e-commerce is able to surpass the hurdles of online shopping and marketing, and eventually flourished. The first online shopping is credited to its inventor, Michael Aldrich, in 1979. Other milestones of e-commerce are listed below:

In 1981, the first B2B online shopping is credited to Thomson Holidays, a travel company in UK (Palmer, 1988).

In 1984, the first B2C online shopping is that of Jane Snowball's online purchasing of groceries from the Tesco grocery...