Early E-commerce
Copyright © Susan Jennerjohn
http://www.JennerJohnHomeBusiness.com


E-commerce actually began long before most of us would have thought. Many years before PCs and laptops in the home and during mobile travel for work or play made Internet commonplace, e-commerce existed.

The first e-commerce occurred way back in 1984, when electronic data interchange (EDI) was made standard through the use of ASC X12 programming. What was important about this was that now companies could reliably complete online transactions with one another. In 1992 Compuserve debuted, offering retail products online to customers for the first time. While this was the first time that e-commerce was enabled for the consumer it was still limited. Consumers had to buy Compuserve, install it on their systems and then subscribe to get into the product. Compuserve did not enable its e-commerce for general public access.

Two years later, in 1994, however, Netscape premiered its online services, offering a simple to use Internet browser. An important part of what Netscape offered was the security necessary for sale online e-commerce transactions. It was called Secure Sockets Layer, and is still a crucial part of every e-commerce transaction or online payment.

Just one year later history was made with the launch of both Amazon.com and eBay.com. Much different than their current e-commerce look, these two online vendor portals at first allowed online purchases but didn't offer any auction based transactions. In fact, at first all Amazon.com offered was the opportunity to buy books, CDs and other print periodicals.

A great part of the reason that e-commerce had not really taken off at this point was because the most common method of getting online, and about all that was available to the public up until 1995, was dial up. It was slow, it interrupted the individual and family's ability to use their own phones and it made e-commerce a cumbersome process.

That's when Digital Subscriber Line, now more commonly referred to as DSL, was introduced. Still using the telephone line, it increased the speed of e-commerce transactions and online search and surfing in general, and offered users the convenience of surfing the Web without tying up their phone line. E-commerce began to grow in popularity as a result.

Broadband soon became a commonplace offering in homes and offices, offering even better speed, an always on convenience and new technology that made the Internet more attractive. E-commerce grew exponentially. As of 1999 Internet spending swelled to $20 billion.