E-Commerce: A Brief Historical and Conceptual Approach

Introduction

To establish the exact moment of EC’s birth is a complex task since there were several precursors, at least since the late 1970s. The introduction of Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) between banks through safe private networks restructured financial markets (Kalakota and Whinston, 1997) and the development of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards enabled companies to exchange commercial documents and transactions between themselves also across private networks. However, it was the emergence of the Internet - which was not used by any of the precursors - that determined our current understanding of EC, so it can be considered that it began in 1995 following the sale of advertising space on the Internet by Netscape and Infoseek (Laudon and Traver, 2009).