E-commerce, as we know and use it today, has changed significantly since the first online transactions took place. In these early years, companies often referred to themselves as ‘portals’ or ‘hubs’ for such transactions. One of the earliest examples of online trading didn't even occur on the Internet. In 1971, the Internet did not exist, but there was a network called ARPANET. The precursor to the modern internet „ARPANET“, was used for research and development in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was this network, that Stanford students used to arrange one of the first portal transactions, which happened to involve a sale of marijuana between the two campuses. However, this online exchange transaction can not be used as perfect example of e-commerce because it was illegal and money wasn’t transferred online. It did however, usher in a new billion-dollar industry which would come to be know as electronic commerce. The first legitimate item purchased via a Website happened in August 1994. Dan Kohn created a website called NetMarket where he sold a CD of Sting’s "Ten Summoner’s Tales" to his friend in Philadelphia for $12.48 plus shipping, and used „SSL“ Secure Sockets Layer, encryption technology to protect credit card information.
There have been significant changes in e-commerce services over the past two decades. Websites have adapted to become more user-friendly, with optimisations for mobile devices, content personalisation, and streamlined checkout processes. This can be largely attributed to advances in technology and software, which has enabled users to build their own websites, tailored to their needs. We saw another big change in 2021, with a shift to using drag-and-drop website builders, such as wix.com, as opposed to the previously dominant Python programming platform. To better understand these changes, one can look at the following statistics that are indicative of how the business has changed over the past years. For example, in 2019 there were 3.6 million eCommerce sites. By 2023, this has grown to a whopping 13.98 million. This is a staggering 288.33% increase. With a rise in the number of websites, e-commerce revenues have also risen exponentially. In 2019, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 3.3 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. According to statista.com, the total global revenue in 2023 will reach 6.3 trillion US dollars, whilst by 2026 this is projected to rise to an astonishing 8.1 trillion USD.
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