History of ecommerce dates back to the invention of the very old notion of “sell and buy”, electricity, cables, computers, modems, and the Internet. The trading of goods has been a major drive of human survival since the beginning of recorded history and beyond. The mass adoption of Internet has created a paradigm shift in the way businesses are conducted today. The past decade has seen an emergence of a new kind of commerce, the buying and selling of goods, through human-computer interaction over the Internet. Today, the line between e-commerce and traditional commerce is becoming more blurred as more businesses start and continue to integrate the Internet and e-commerce technologies into their business processes.

a) Timeline
1. 1990: Tim Berners-Lee writes the first web browser, World Wide Web, using a NeXT computer.

2. 1992: J.H. Snider and Terra Ziporyn publish Future Shop: How New Technologies Will Change the Way We Shop and What We Buy. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312063598.

3. 1994: Netscape releases the Navigator browser in October under the code name Mozilla. Pizza Hut offers pizza ordering on its Web page. The first online bank opens. Attempts to offer flower delivery and magazine subscriptions online. Adult materials also becomes commercially available, as do cars and bikes. Netscape 1.0 is introduced in late 1994 SSL encryption that made transactions secure.

4. 1995: Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com and the first commercial-free 24 hour, internet-only radio stations, Radio HK and NetRadio start broadcasting. Dell and Cisco begin to aggressively use Internet for commercial transactions. eBay is founded by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb.

5. 1998: Electronic postal stamps can be purchased and downloaded for printing from the Web.

6. 1999: Business.com sold for US $7.5 million to eCompanies, which was purchased in 1997 for US $149,000. The peer-to-peer filesharing software Napster launches. ATG Stores launches to sell decorative items for the home online.

7. 2000: The dot-com bust.

8. 2002: eBay acquires PayPal for $1.5 billion. Niche retail companies CSN Stores and NetShops are founded with the concept of selling products through several targeted domains, rather than a central portal.

9. 2003: Amazon.com posts first yearly profit.

10. 2007: Business.com acquired by R.H. Donnelley for $345 million .

11. 2008: US E-Commerce and Online Retail sales projected to reach $204 billion, an increase of 17 percent over 2007.

Evolution of Electronic Commerce
E-Commerce was birth out of the World-Wide-Web (WWW). Although many people use the terms WWW and Internet interchangeably, the WWW is just one of the many services available on the Internet. The aspect of the WWW actually is a relatively new aspect of the Internet. While the Internet was developed in the late 1960s, the WWW came into existence more than a decade ago - in the early 1990s. Since then, it has grown phenomenally to become the most widely used service on the Internet. The Web has made online shopping possible for many businesses and individuals. Now, even banks have been using electronic funds transfer (EFT, also called wire transfer), which are electronic transmissions of account exchange information over private communication networks.

Businesses also have been engaging in a form of electronic commerce, known as electronic data interchange, for many years. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) occurs when business transmits computer-readable data in a standard format to another business. In the 1960s, businesses realized that many of the documents they exchange related to the shipping of goods - such as invoices, purchase orders, and bills of lading - and included the same set of information for almost every transaction. They also realized that they were spending a good deal of time and money entering these data into their computers, printing paper forms, and then re-entering the data on the other side of the transaction. Although the purchase order, invoice, and bill of lading for each transaction contained much of the same information such as item numbers, descriptions, prices and quantities - each paper form had its own unique format for presenting that information. By creating a set of standard formats for transmitting that information electronically, businesses were able to reduce errors, avoid printing and mailing costs, and eliminate the need to re-enter the data.