The earliest recorded instance of electronic commerce occurred in 1971 when students at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology arranged a cannabis sale using the ARPANET. John Markoff later described this event as the seminal act of e-commerce in his book What the Dormouse Said.
Michael Aldrich demonstrated the first online shopping system in 1979 which utilized early networking technology to connect buyers and sellers across different campuses. By 1984, California passed its Electronic Commerce Act establishing legal frameworks for digital trade that same year Karen Earle Lile and Kendall Ross Bean created an e-commerce service in San Francisco Bay Area.
In the United States the Federal Trade Commission regulates all forms of advertising including online advertising under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. China adopted the Electronic Signature Law on the 28th of August 2004 through the eleventh session of the tenth NPC Standing Committee while the UK implemented Payment Services Regulations 2009 which came into effect on the 1st of November 2009.
Retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to $2.3 trillion in 2017 according to the provided text. Online markets grew at noticeable rates during this period while traditional markets experienced only 2% growth during the same timeframe.
Only 35 percent of North American cardboard manufacturing capacity came from recycled content compared to 80 percent recycling rates in Europe and 93 percent in Asia. In 2018 e-commerce generated substantial amounts of container cardboard in North America representing an increase from previous years.