By: Bill Davis
It feels both recent and a long time ago that ecommerce kicked off in the early '90s.
Recent because in the year 2018, some businesses still scoff at ecommerce. For example, a firm I purchase from for my ecommerce site took almost two weeks to fulfill an order because it does not have, nor does it see any need for, an ecommerce site (even though it offers no way of checking what's in inventory).
A long time ago because it’s been over 23 years since I first got started in ecommerce. As the saying goes, “the more things change, the more things stay the same.”
A Walk Down Ecommerce Memory Lane
So how did we arrive to the current state of ecommerce? One look at Amazon's growth in the last year alone will show how far we've come: from roughly $124 billion in ecommerce sales in 2016, to approximately $160.5 billion in 2017, marking over 29 percent revenue growth.
Given the magnitude of its revenues — that’s billion with a B — that’s a phenomenal growth rate and one that accelerated faster than its 2015 to 2016 ecommerce growth. It's estimated that Amazon accounted for 44 percent of all U.S. ecommerce sales in 2017 and almost 4 percent of all U.S. retail sales (yikes). And its growth will likely go uninterrupted for the foreseeable future.
The early 1990s were a different and exciting time. The internet was finally opened up for commercial purposes in 1992, with Congress passing the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act, which formally permitted The National Science Foundation to connect to commercial networks in support of research and education. From there, numerous companies emerged in 1994 with the aim of commercializing the internet. Phil Brandenberger made the first secure transaction over the world wide web in August 1994 and the pace accelerated greatly with the release of Netscape Navigator in October of the same year.
In the early days the technology wasn’t mature enough to develop really sophisticated ecommerce sites. Buying online was still a relatively new phenomenon and had yet to gain widespread acceptance. The dot com crash of the early oughts acted as a further obstacle, causing many businesses to write off the ecommerce business model while companies like Amazon, eBay and others persevered.
Read More >> https://www.cmswire.com/digital-experience/get-off-the-ecommerce-sidelines/
No comments:
Post a Comment