E-Commerce was a term coined to refer to electronic commerce. Today we are all familiar with this term and have all participated in e-commerce transactions. We have bought Christmas gifts online, ordered books from Amazon or bought supplies for our business. Today e-commerce has become a vital part of our economy. This was not the case ten years ago. When the concept first arrived it received only a modicum of success and a mixed reaction from consumers. Many of the companies that were started at that time and relied on e-commerce to generate business had to eventually shut down because no one wanted to conduct transactions online. In this article we will understand a little more about e-commerce and take a look at how it has changed over the last ten years.
E-commerce is essentially trade transactions that are transported out over the internet. Ten years ago the internet was still growing and internet itself has changed so much over the last ten years. Thanks to the arrival of broadband and wireless the speed of the internet increased and over the years more and more people have joined the online network. This has helped increase the scope of e-commerce as today almost everyone has an online presence and so almost everyone has the potential to participate in electronic commerce.
To complete a transaction goods or services need to move from the seller to the buyer and money needs to go to the seller from the buyer. The biggest problem with e-commerce in the beginning was that there was no trusted method for people to make payments online. Even ten years ago you could make a payment by credit card on the internet but at that time there was very little security, business modules were still new and a large number of people were very dependent to give out their card details to a website. Today thanks to the development of merchant accounts and payment gateways you can make a secure payment online without worrying about security. Thanks to the improvement in technology you can even track your payment after it has been made.
The fact that people can now make secure payments online has made e-commerce an integral part of every individual's life. Ten years ago hard goods that were sold primarily from catalogs or retail shops were selling very poorly online. Today thanks to the improvements in payment methods and websites people can get a detailed description of each good and can safely purchase it online. The credit for this phenomenon goes to the development of merchant accounts and payment gateways. Merchant accounts have helped make business to business transactions more easy and secure. Payment gateways provide security and have made tracking online payments a lot easier. With the arrival of social networking websites more power has shifted to the consumers. E-commerce s here to stay and if you have an online business you should look into getting a merchant account with a good merchant service provider.