Sunday, 7 September 2014

Origin of E-Commerce

Origin of E-Commerce
E-commerce refers to conducting business online with the help of electronic
devices like personal computers, phone lines, fax machines, pagers and so on.
In the 1950s, computers were used by organizations to process and store records
of internal transactions. However, information between businesses continued
to be exchanged on paper, like purchase orders, invoices, cheques, remittance
devices and other standard forms, which were used to document transactions.
IBM was the first company which used the term ‘e-commerce’
internationally. In 1972, IBM used the term as ‘e-commerce’ and the first
successful transaction was executed between the US and the European Union
in 1993, with the invention of personal computers.
By the 1960s, businesses that engaged in large volumes of transactions
had begun exchanging transaction information on punched cards or magnetic
tapes. Data communications technology eventually allowed trading partners to
transfer data over telephone lines, instead of shipping punched cards or magnetic
tapes to each other in advance.
Although these information transfer agreements between trading partners
increased efficiency and reduced errors, they were still not an ideal solution.Only large trading partners could afford to participate in the benefits of these
paper-free exchanges, because the translation programmes that one trading
partner wrote generally would not work for other trading partners.
Several freight and shipping companies, in 1968, joined hands to form
the Transportation Data Coordinating Committee (TDCC), which was charged
with exploring paths to minimize the load that shippers and carriers faced. The
shipper could electronically transmit the computer file to any freight company
that had adopted the TDCC format. Therefore, they were saved from the printing
and handling of forms, and also from entering the data twice and having to
worry about error-correction procedures.
During the 1970s, the introduction of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
between banks over a secured private network changed the financial market.
In 1973, the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) committee developed
a uniform EDI standard. This committee and its subcommittees included experts
from the information technology background from over 800 organizations. During
the late 1970s and early 1980s, e-commerce became widespread within
companies in the form of electronic messaging technologies, i.e., EDI and email.
Combining a range of processes, such as EDI, electronic mail (e-mail),
WWW and Internet applications, e-commerce provides ways to exchange
information between individuals, companies and customers and most important
of them all, between computers. The core media of e-commerce remains the
Internet and the WWW.
E-commerce is the paperless exchange of information in a business with
the use of EDI, electronic bulletin board, e-mail and other technologies. E commerce
helps to automate processes and transactions that are manually
done on paper. It assists companies to change the way they operate and become
completely e-environment friendly.

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