According to several internet historians, the first known e-commerce transaction was a drug deal. Students at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Massachussetts Institute of Technology used their Arpanet accounts to buy weed from each other in 1971 or 1972.
Since then, e-commerce has expanded to include a wide range of commercial activities. The 1980s saw the initial development of online shopping in tandem with the growth of email and bulletin board systems. Many bulletin boards had classified advertisements and allowed niche businesses to connect with customers.
The 1990s saw the increasing market penetration of the internet, facilitated by development of the first web browsers. Amazon was founded in 1995. Business-to-business applications began to move online in this period.
The major innovations of the 2000s were the rise of mobile phones and the development of secure electronic payment systems such as PayPal and the ubiquity of electronic banking.
Although we cannot actually know the future, on the basis of existing trends, we can foresee that e-commerce will replace bricks-and-mortar in many areas, often with physical stores simply acting as showrooms for electronic ones. Although cash may not entirely disappear, electronic wallets, often centered on smart phones, will be increasingly dominant. Logistics infrastructure will remain the key to successful e-commerce, especially as it expands into frontier markets.
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