Long before the world of Amazon and Flipkart, before Etsy and e-commerce were a thing, transactions to buy things of need occurred in stores situated at the periphery of our homes. While we all waited patiently to go out to the market to buy our monthly supplies, the lack of options, the absence of comparisons, and above all, the restriction on price negotiation limited our zeal to strive for better products.

With the advent of e-commerce and the revolution brought by the internet, businesses have gained new wings to fuel their growth in a highly competitive economic world. Read along as we take you on a journey about the evolution of e-commerce, which changed the way businesses operate forever.

The arrival of the Internet

The Internet arrived on the scene around 1991 and, by early 2000, had taken the world by storm with e-commerce, first leveraged in Western Europe and the USA. In 1995, Amazon and eBay introduced the world to a newer parallel of business operation, and later, during the mid-2000s, courtesy of fierce competition, e-commerce website SEO became a thing to make businesses stand out.

A new dawn of marketing

A brand-new era in marketing began in 2000 with the appearance of Google AdWords, which, despite early skepticism, swiftly caught the attention of the business community by leveraging the company's extensive and global database to enable businesses to operate internationally from their garages. As a result, the first digital marketing services were created, and even now, technical expertise in AdWords operation is still in demand.

Personification gets leveled up

While social media came around in 1995 with the advent of Bolt and Degrees, it took a significant turn with the incoming social space giant Facebook in 2004. Since then, while hordes of social media apps have surfaced, the most popular being Instagram and WhatsApp, apart from humane interaction, what they have also provided the human community with is a new way to further their businesses. Marketing agencies across social media platforms leverage the data on human and age preferences to run curated ads on the platform for better audience targeting.

Cross-border operations

Post the advent of the internet the only thing required to manifest the sale of physical goods across the border was an efficient transport system riding on the waves of transparency. E-commerce, by the way, it is regulated, has provided a boost to certain nations' economies, such as Taiwan and New Zealand, to inflate their GDP in an exceptional manner.

As evident from the above points, while e-commerce has been here for as long as we can remember, taking advantage of it is the need of the hour to grow businesses in the postmodern era we live in.