Basic e-Commerce concepts

Lesson 1

Introduction to basic e-Commerce concepts

Our brief history of e-Commerce begins around 1965 with the mainframe computer.

Fast forward to the year 2009
By 1995, information technology looked like a vast ocean of unconnected applications.

Some applications used mainframe/dumb-client architectures
Some applications operated exclusively on PCs
Some applications used client/server designs

Despite three decades of increasing sophistication in computing architectures, most communities of users might as well have been on different planets. During this time, computer systems typically operated only within their owners' secure boundaries.
The popularity of the Internet grows
BBS/ EDI

Early attempts at "on-line" applications usually took the form of bulletin board services (BBS).
The Internet was one of many services that fell under the BBS umbrella.
Originally, the Internet served governmental and educational communities of interest. However, the audience quickly changed in 1995 as businesses and the general public became aware of the capabilities of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Web browsers enter the picture
The creation of the commercial Web browser, developed and popularized by Netscape, and the re-purposing of on-line services into Internet on-ramp service providers (also known as ISPs, like AOL) made it possible for any PC with a modem to get onto the Web.
At first, the Internet and the Web were viewed as fun and/or useful services for academia, government, and consumers. Little by little, however, corporations began to realize that the architecture of the Internet and the Web could be used to deploy certain types of applications that were difficult or impossible to deploy on existing architectures (like client/server).
Organizations and their technology architects began to grasp that a combination of universal networking through TCP/IP and the graphical user interface (GUI) of the Web offered a compelling architectural platform for a new class of applications.
What type of applications?
Organizations found that the architecture of the Internet was a useful tool for creating and using internal applications. One of the more popular organizational applications was a new kind of intra-organization bulletin board system known as an Intranet.

Bulletin board services: An electronic message database where people can log in, read, and leave messages.
Intranet: A private Internet reserved for use by people who have been given the authority or passwords. These people are typically employees and often customers of a company.
Internet: A global network connecting millions of computers that are joined through a high-speed backbone of data links.
World Wide Web: A system of Internet servers supporting specially formatted documents that support links to other documents, graphics, audio, and video files. The documents are formatted in special language (HTML, DHTML, XML, etc.).
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP): A suite of communications protocols used to connect computer systems and transfer data over the Internet.

e-Commerce infancy

In addition, organizations realized that they could create Web-based applications that reached beyond the boundaries of their organization. Organizations began to use the Web to communicate and conduct transactions electronically with:

Consumer customers ( Business to Consumer (B2C): Commerce is conducted between a consumer, such as a home user on a PC, and a business. business to consumer or B2C)
Business customers and suppliers(business to business or B2B)

The focus of this course
The tools and technologies of today's e-Commerce world are the subjects of this course.