Electronic commerce, or e-commerce, refers to the buying and selling of goods and services using the internet. And it isn’t just important - it is one of the fundamental technology disruptions of our time. According to Shopify, a leading e-commerce platform, the first ever online sale was a Sting CD purchased through NetMarket on August 11, 1994. In the decades since, e-commerce has gone on to transform the retail landscape for physical goods while also enabling a market for digital goods, as well as the digital advertising that fuels Google and Facebook.
For physical products, e-commerce has changed business models and product strategies for everything from toothpaste to luxury goods. The power of the internet allowed Amazon to grow from being a bookseller to a platform that sells literally everything, by combining online marketing to build a platform that can sell anything along with old-fashioned logistics expertise to deliver it at scale. For companies that were already selling products in the pre-internet era, e-commerce has allowed them to sell direct to customers, as well as providing new digital marketing analytics on buyer preferences to inform product/market fit and brand management strategies.
E-commerce has also created a universe of purely digital products, including those that replace physical goods such as Spotify as well as those that offer new ways of delivering traditional services such as Uber. The ability to sell software ranging from image editing tools to meditation apps across multiple platforms over the internet has also led to an explosion of innovation in products that could never have existed prior to the e-commerce era.