The Development and Growth of Electronic Commerce:

Economists describe four distinct waves (or phases) that occurred in the Industrial Revolution. In each wave, different business strategies were successful. Electronic commerce and the information revolution brought about by the Internet likely go through such series of waves.

The First Wave of Electronic Commerce: 1995 -2003 (i) The Dotcom companies of first wave are mostly American companies. Thereby their websites were only in English. The Dotcom bubble had attracted huge investments to first wave companies.

(ii)As the Internet was mere read-only web (web 1.0) and network technology was in its beginning stage, the bandwidth and network security was very low.

(iii) Only EDI and unstructured E-mail remained as a mode of information exchange between businesses.

(iv) But the first wave companies enjoyed the firstmove advantage and customers had left with no options.

The Second Wave of Electronic Commerce: 2004 – 2009

(i) The second wave is the rebirth of E-Commerce after the dotcom burst. The second wave is considered as the global wave, with sellers doing business in many countries and in many languages.

(ii) Language translation and currency conversion were focused in the second wave websites.

(iii) The second wave companies used their own internal funds and gradually expanded their ECommerce opportunities.

(iv) As a result E-Commerce grows more steadily, though more slowly. The rapid development of network technologies and interactive web (web 2.0, a period of social media) offered the consumers more choices of buying. The increased web users nourished E-Commerce companies (mostly B2C companies) during the second wave.

The Third Wave of Electronic Commerce: 2010 – Present

(i) The third wave is brought on by the mobile technologies. It connects users via mobile devices for real-time and on-demand transactions, mobile technologies.

(ii) It connects users via mobile devices for real-time and on-demand transactions. Not only the information is filtered by time, but also the geographic coordinates are used to screen the specific location-tailored information properly.

(iii) The term Web 3.0, summarize the various characteristics of the future Internet which include Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Web. Generic Database etc.