Page 33 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

10 1 Overview of Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Figure 1.3 Categories of
transactions in e-commerce

A Brief History of EC of technology and Internet usage, EC will undoubtedly con-
tinue to grow, add new business models, and introduce change.
The pioneering of e-commerce applications can be tracked to More and more EC successes are emerging. For a comprehen-
the early 1970s when money was transferred electronically, sive ready-reference guide to EC including statistics, trends,
mostly among financial institutions (known as electronic and in-depth profiles of hundreds of companies, see Plunkett
funds transfer [EFT]), whereby funds could be routed elec- et al. (2015) and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commerce.
tronically from one organization to another. However, the While looking at the history of EC, one must keep in mind
use of these applications was limited to large corporations, the following:
financial institutions, and a few other daring businesses.
Then came electronic data interchange (EDI), a technology The Global Nature of EC
used to enable the electronically transfer of routine docu-
ments. EDI later expanded from financial transactions to EC activities can be seen between and within countries. As a
other types of transactions (see Online Tutorial T2 for more matter of fact, the largest EC company in the word is Alibaba
on EDI). More new EC applications followed, ranging from Group of China (see Chapter 2). See also Tse (2015).
travel reservation systems to online stock trading.
The Internet appeared on the scene in 1969, as an experi- The Interdisciplinary Nature of EC
ment by the U.S. government, and its initial users were mostly
academic researchers and other scientists. Some users started From just the brief overview of the EC framework and classifi-
to place personal classifieds on the Internet. A major mile- cation, you can probably see that EC is related to several differ-
stone in the development of EC was the appearance of the ent disciplines. The major academic EC disciplines include the
World Wide Web (The “Web”) in the early 1990s. This allowed following: accounting, business law, computer science, con-
companies to have a presence on the Internet with both text sumer behavior, economics, engineering, finance, human
and photos. When the Internet became commercialized and resource management, management, management information
users began flocking to participate in the World Wide Web in systems, marketing, public administration, and robotics.
the early 1990s, the term electronic commerce was introduced.
EC applications rapidly expanded. A large number of so- The Google Revolution
called dot-coms, or Internet start-ups, also appeared. Today,
all companies in the developing countries have presence on During its early years, EC was impacted by companies such as
the Web. Many of these sites contain tens of thousands of Amazon.com, eBay, AOL, and Yahoo!. However, since 2001
pages and links. In 1999, the emphasis of EC shifted from no other company has probably had more of an impact on EC
B2C to B2B, and in 2001 from B2B to B2E, c-commerce, than Google. Google-related Web searches are targeting adver-
e-government, e-learning, and m-commerce. In 2005, social tisements much better than its competitors. Today, Google is
networks started to receive quite a bit of attention, as did much more than just a search engine; it employs many innova-
m-commerce and wireless applications. As of 2009, EC added tive EC models, is involved in many EC joint ventures, and
social commerce channels. An example is the increasing com- impacts both organizational activities and individual lives.
mercial activities on Facebook and Twitter. Given the nature Google companies are organized under the “Alphabet” name.