E-Commerce Began the Rapid Evolution

¶ … E-Commerce Began

The rapid evolution of the Internet as a communications and collaboration platform created an inexpensive, increasingly secure, and ubiquitous foundation for conducting commerce as well. Initial e-commerce business models and their associate websites often combined the speed and customization of the rapidly evolving Web publishing protocols with the fulfillment and logistics systems of traditional brick-and-mortar (Wymer, Regan, 2005). This hybrid approach typified the business models of the first e-commerce systems, giving way eventually to fully automated e-commerce platforms capable of spanning the entire breadth of transactions necessary to support an entire business model online (Gotzamani, Tzavlopoulos, 2009). This led to many analysts, pundits and others saying e-commerce would lead to rapid disintermediation of traditional brick-and-mortal stores first and later the entire indirect sales channels across industries (Wymer, Regan, 2005). In fact this never did occur as online consumers were learning quickly which sellers they could and could not trust. This aspect of trust still pervades e-commerce today, and throughout this analysis it is clear to see how the companies succeeding the most have the ability to make e-commerce trustworthy on a consistent basis.

How E-Commerce Began

The convergence of three critical elements brought about the initial development of e-commerce and also served to fuel its growth over time. These three critical developments that created the catalyst of e-commerce include the continual investments in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocols (HTTP) initially followed by the rapid expansion of additional display protocols including HTML5, the most recent; the rapid advances in pricing, product fulfillment and online shopping technologies including guided selling and product configuration that Dell uses to sell build-to-order PCs; and the rapid ascent of back office systems including those used for distributed order management (Gotzamani, Tzavlopoulos, 2009). These three factors of the programming languages, user interface improvements and navigational improvements, and build-out of back-office systems are what is driving the rapid pace of innovation in e-commerce today. Amazon is widely respected throughout the e-commerce industry for choosing to build one of the most advanced distributed order management and procurement systems that could order just a single book, before they actually created their websites (Barsauskas, Sarapovas, Cvilikas, 2008). This gave Jeff Bezos and Amazon an immediate competitive advantage against the many other e-commerce competitors who only relied on the websites themselves without paying attention making fulfillment reliable and cost-effective (Kelley, Hora, Margheim, 2010). Amazon set a new standard with e-commerce system design and development. These improvements continue to revolutionize the back-office aspects of e-commerce today.