The history of e-commerce dates back to the 1970's. With the start of EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), these programs allowed companies to facilitate commercial transactions electronically. Throughout the 1980's the e-commerce, orELECTRONIC COMMERCE, started to grow even more. With this growth came even more acceptance of credit cards and ATM's (Automated Teller Machines). By the 1990's e-commerce ERP systems (Electronic Resource Planning) was introduced, as well as data warehousing and data mining. *Data Mining is the process of sorting through large amounts of data and picking out relevant information.

 

By the mid 1990's popularity of the Internet grew. By 2000, many US and Western European companies began to emerge on the World Wide Web. With this emergence came a new meaning for e-commerce. Unfortunately, during 2000 many of these e-commerce businesses disappeared with the dot-com collapse. Even though the Internet was being used by the general public now, the largest transactions of e-commerce were B2B (Business 2 Business). This all took place by the end of 2001 and translated into nearly $700 billion dollars in transactions.

 

In 1994 Amazon.com, Inc had begun. Founded by Jeff Bezos and launched by 1995, the company started out selling books. To date, Amazon.com, Inc has added many other products to its line. Some of these products are DVDs, MP3s, CDs, Furniture and much more. As one of the founding e-commerce companies, Amazon.com, Inc has revenue of US $14.84 billion and a net income of US $476 million as of 2007. By 2007, Amazon.com, Inc has nearly 17,000 personnel working for the company.

 

In closing, the effect of e-commerce can be seen throughout our everyday lives. Whether it is in the form of ATM's, online banking, shopping or credit card transactions, one thing remains the same... e-commerce in a sense has made our lives easier. From a business stand point to a consumer view, e-commerce has developed into a technology of endless avenues. As our lives push forward and grow, so does this technology. E-commerce is the future and will continueto impact us as we continue to shop, bank and spend our hard earned cash.