FREE ESSAY ON E-COMMERCE

E-COMMERCE

The Internet has caught on like wild fire. No one ever intended for it to be so
commercially successful. In the beginning, its main purpose was to send and receive
messages; no one anticipated that one-day people could buy books and cars over a
computer. Though with the advancement of certain technologies, this has happened.
E-commerce is a worldwide commodity that has taken the place of trips to the supermarket
and has given us the freedom to conduct business at out house in our pajamas.
To fully understand what e-commerce is, you must first understand where it came from. It
all started with the DOD (Department of Defense) in 1996. After the Cold War the
Government wanted a reliable line of communication. If a network link became damaged by
enemy attack, the information on it could be rerouted automatically to other links. This
was the birth of the Internet. In order to use anything on the Internet, it is required
that you learn to operate a separate program, one for the mail, one for news groups, and
several different programs for accessing databases.
This all changed in 1989. A researcher at CERN (a big European physics laboratory) named
Tim Berners-Lee started to work on hypertext. By using hypertext he could link together
all the different kinds of information available on the Internet.
Berners-Lee called the software pack the World Wide Web.
For the World Wide Web to work, each page has it's own address that the web recognizes
using a system called HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol). Each page has to be written
with a special language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). This language tells the
computer how to display a page. 
Now with the invention of the web, Businesses can use pictures to help sell their
merchandise online, And now that the Internet is everywhere- in schools, libraries, and
even cafes - anyone can order just about anything from anywhere.
It is now easier than ever to have and start your own web page; anyone form a big
corporation or even the average joe can build his for her own web page. Just like Jeff
Bezos, Time magazine's Person of the Year of 1999. With a loan from the bank, Jeff
founded Amazon.com in his garage and helped start e-commerce, as we now know it. Many
companies are trying to more like Amazon.com and trying to be as profitable as Bezon and
Amazon.com. An example of this is eBay.com, an online web auction site, that lets
everyone clean out his or her attic and make a profit. Like Sharon Balkwitsch who has
sold antiques on eBay. For instance, an Art Deco ashtray that she bought for $20, sold
for $290, and a vase she bought for $5 sold for $585, both on eBay. She could make
nowhere near that much by selling these items in her hometown. Now thanks to the web
everyone all aver the world can have a chance to bid on these items and help make Sharone
richer.
E-commerce is still in its developmental stage at this point. There is room for
improvement form the creators as well as the manufacturers of these goods being sold on
the web. With as much support as e-commerce has gotten, it is easy to see that it will be
a lasting innovation in the world of computers.