This is an old subject but I think need newer thoughts.
As we know that the Internet was conceived in 1969, when the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (a Department of Defense organization) funded research
of computer networking. The World Wide Web emerged in 1990s. Ecommerce became
possible in 1991 when the Internet was opened to commercial use. Since that
date thousands of businesses have taken up residence at web sites.

If we check history of ecommerce, this referred to the
invention of the very old notion of “sell and buy”. Internet began popularity
in 1994 and in year 2000, lots of business in USA
and Europe started their venture in internet
and the terminology of ecommerce became popular. Although dot-com era collapsed
in 2000 and lots of companies has vanished, the brick& mortar retailer
understood the importance of ecommerce. By the end of 2001, the largest form of
ecommerce, Business-to-Business (B2B) model, had around $700 billion in
transactions. In next few years, ecommerce is become an important services for
the user. Amazon who started with online book business, became one of the major
players in the ecommerce. Dell took one step more and decided to sell their
goods over online and became successful. As per available data, in year 2007,
3.4 percentages of total sales happen through ecommerce. Ecommerce has a great
deal of advantages over “brick and mortar” stores and mail order catalogs.

Ecommerce is evolved in 2000 and till then there is not much
change in the ecommerce sites except there is few sites come-up with web2.0
look and feel changes. Few companies come-up with new business model to
accommodate local vendors. But if you see the functionality perspective there
is no change happened till its inception and it seems that ecommerce sites does
not take risk of introducing new functionality, I mean they want to continue
with what they have. Currently there are hundreds of ecommerce sites available
in the World and the basic functionality of any ecommerce sites is limited to
“search” & “compare”. We need a great revolution around ecommerce in coming days
with new ideas having a totally different look & feel, user experience. I will bet
that it will rock and user will see the difference from cnet, amazon and dell. As per
PEW internet report, million of internet users feels that current ecommerce sites are
having lack of information and very poor user experience. So give a thought about next
generation ecommerce.

I am going to start reviewing some of the upcoming ecommerce sites and will publish
my comments in near future and how their approach towards social commerce.