A brief history of e-commerce
22.10.2015 05:58
- 1887: US statistician Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) sets up the forerunner of IBM(International Business Machines), a company that will pioneer electronic forms of doing business in the decades that follow.
- 1950s-1960s: IBM pioneers online transaction processing (OLTP): a way of handling money transactions instantly (in "real-time") using sophisticated computerized systems. With American Airlines, IBM develops an OLTP system called SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment) that revolutionizes airline reservations. In 1969, IBM's transaction-processing software evolves into CICS (Customer Information Control System), one of its least-known but most successful products.
- 1970: US company Docutel invents the ATM (automated teller machine, also known as the "cashpoint"), which works using online transactions made through bank computers. The popularity of ATMs leads to even more sophisticated forms of transaction processing.
- 1980s: CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL (America Online) let people shop from home using their computers and telephone lines.
- 1989: Tim Berners-Lee (1955-) invents the World Wide Web, unwittingly laying the foundations for an explosive growth of e-commerce in the years that follow.
- 1994: Jeff Bezos (1964-) founds Amazon.com, the iconic e-store.
- 1994: Marc Andreessen (1971-) develops the Netscape Navigator web browser, which ships with a feature called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer): built-in encryption that allows credit card transactions to be carried out securely online. There is a huge explosion in online shopping and business and the dot.com phenomenon begins.
- 2000/2001: The dot.com bubble bursts and over 750 online businesses go to the wall. At one point, Amazon.com's share price plunges to less than 10 percent of its original value.
- 2008: E-commerce represents about 3.4 percent of total sales.
- 2015: The US Census Bureau reports that US e-commerce retail sales for the second quarter of 2015 are $83.9 billion (up from $51.2 billion for the same period of 2012, adjusted for seasonal variation). In 2Q 2015, e-commerce represents about 7.2 percent of total sales (up from 4.7 percent in 2012).
