E-commerce

• 1. Introduction

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  E-commerce traces its formal legal birth to 1984, when California enacted its Electronic Commerce Act, the first law in the United States to use the term in an official title. The man who coined the phrase was Robert Jacobson, a principal consultant to the California State Assembly's Utilities and Commerce Committee, working alongside Committee Chairwoman Gwen Moore of Los Angeles. That same year, a 72-year-old woman named Mrs Snowball placed what is recorded as the first online home shopping order, through the Gateshead SIS/Tesco system in England. Two milestones, an ocean apart, in a single calendar year. What began in a committee hearing room and a home terminal in Gateshead has since grown into a force that sent global retail e-commerce sales past $1 trillion in 2012 and reshaped how nearly every economy on earth moves goods. This documentary asks how that happened, who built it, and what it has done to the world it remade.

• 2. Before the Storefront

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  In 1971 or 1972, students at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory used the ARPANET to arrange a cannabis sale with peers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. John Markoff's book What the Dormouse Said later called this transaction "the seminal act of e-commerce." The technology was raw and the transaction illicit, but the logic was already there: two parties exchanging value over a network without meeting in person. Michael Aldrich demonstrated the first proper online shopping system in 1979, but it took infrastructure to make commerce practical. France gave that infrastructure a national test in 1982, when France Telecom introduced Minitel and used it for online ordering. The first B2B online shopping system went live in 1981, installed by Thomson Holidays in the United Kingdom, proving that businesses could transact with each other electronically before consumers could do the same. Tim Berners-Lee then wrote the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990 on a NeXT computer, handing developers the tool that would make retail-facing commerce accessible to ordinary people. In October 1994, Netscape released its Navigator browser under the code name Mozilla, and Netscape 1.0 arrived shortly after with SSL encryption, giving transactions the security layer that cautious consumers required.

• 3. Landmark Firsts

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  "Ten Summoner's Tales" by Sting became the first secure online retail purchase, completed through NetMarket in 1994. On the 27th of April 1995, Paul Stanfield, product manager for CompuServe UK, bought a book from W H Smith inside CompuServe's UK Shopping Centre, completing the United Kingdom's first national online shopping service secure transaction. That same launch featured retailers including Tesco, Virgin Megastores, Dixons Retail, and PC World. Also in 1995, Amazon was launched by Jeff Bezos, and eBay was founded by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar under the name AuctionWeb, becoming the first online auction site to support person-to-person transactions. In April 1984, CompuServe had already launched the Electronic Mall in the United States and Canada, described as the first comprehensive electronic commerce service, more than a decade before those 1995 landmarks. Book Stacks Unlimited in Cleveland opened a commercial sales website at books.com in 1992, selling books with credit card processing, giving an early glimpse of what Amazon would scale. By 1999, global e-commerce had reached $150 billion. Alibaba Group was also established in China in 1999, and Alibaba.com achieved profitability in December 2001, setting up one of the industry's defining rivalries.

• 4. The Architecture of Commerce

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  E-commerce draws on a wide set of interlocking technologies: mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange, inventory management systems, and automated data collection. The term electronic data interchange, or EDI, refers specifically to the structured exchange of business documents between companies, and it underpins the B2B tier of the industry. There are five essential categories of e-commerce: Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer, Business-to-Government, Consumer-to-Business, and Consumer-to-Consumer, with Direct-to-Consumer representing a newer variant in which manufacturers bypass traditional retail intermediaries entirely. Direct-to-Consumer growth accelerated through platforms such as Shopify, TikTok Shop, and Instagram Checkout. Dropshipping, in which a vendor takes orders without holding any inventory and routes fulfillment to a third-party supplier, became commonplace in online marketplaces. A Global Market Insights report projected the dropshipping market would reach $1.51 trillion by 2032, naming Alibaba.com, Shopify, Printful, and Spocket among the primary platforms. The DeLone and McLean Model identified three factors behind a successful e-business: information system quality, service quality, and user satisfaction. SAP ERP, Xero, and Megaventory represent the class of enterprise resource planning tools that companies adopted to manage supplier and customer operations as these systems matured.

• 5. Regulation Across Borders

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  The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 established national standards for direct marketing over e-mail in the United States, while the Federal Trade Commission uses its authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act to enforce corporate privacy policies and prohibit unfair or deceptive online advertising. The Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act of 2008 amended the Controlled Substances Act to specifically address online pharmacies. Internationally, many countries adopted the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce from 1996 to create legal uniformity across borders. The International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network, formed in 1991 from an informal network of government trade organisations, gave rise to Econsumer.gov, an ICPEN initiative that launched in April 2001 as a portal for reporting complaints about cross-border transactions. In China, the Electronic Signature Law was adopted on the 28th of August 2004 by the eleventh session of the tenth National People's Congress Standing Committee; it is considered the first law in China's dedicated e-commerce legislation. China's Telecommunications Regulations, promulgated on the 25th of September 2000, assigned the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology oversight of all e-commerce related activity. The United Kingdom's Payment Services Regulations 2009 came into effect on the 1st of November 2009, implementing the European Union's Payment Services Directive and creating a new regulated class of firms called payment institutions. Conflict of laws across jurisdictions remains a major hurdle for any attempt to harmonise a single global legal framework.

• 6. Regional Growth Patterns

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  China's online shopping sales reached $253 billion in the first half of 2015 alone, accounting for 10% of total Chinese consumer retail sales in that period. In 2013, Alibaba held an e-commerce market share of 80% in China. By 2014, its B2B platform still led with 44.82%, ahead of Made-in-China.com at 3.21% and GlobalSources.com at 2.98%, with China's total B2B market transaction value exceeding 4.5 billion yuan that year. Alibaba's NYSE debut under the ticker BABA ranked as the biggest IPO in U.S. history at the time, raising $25 billion in 2014 after the company had delisted from the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2012 and completed a $2.5 billion buyback. China accounted for 42.4% of worldwide retail e-commerce by value in 2016, the highest share of any country. The State Council's Internet Plus initiative in 2015 set a five-year plan to integrate traditional manufacturing with big data, cloud computing, and internet-of-things technology. In the Arab states, the 30-34 year age group represents a significant portion of online shoppers, Egypt holds the largest internet user base in the region, and the Gulf Cooperation Council's e-commerce market was projected to surpass $20 billion by 2020. India had approximately 460 million internet users as of December 2017, with cash on delivery accounting for 75% of e-retail activity. In 2010, the United Kingdom held the highest per capita e-commerce spending in the world.

• 7. Disruption and Consequence

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  In March 2020, global retail website traffic hit 14.3 billion visits, a peak driven by pandemic lockdowns. Online sales in the United States increased by 25% and online grocery shopping rose by over 100% during that period. As many as 29% of surveyed American shoppers said after the pandemic that they would never return to in-person shopping; in the United Kingdom, 43% of consumers expected to keep shopping the same way even after lockdowns ended. The rise of major e-commerce platforms has been cited as a driver of what observers call a "retail apocalypse" in the United States, as companies struggled to attract foot traffic and shifted to closing physical stores. E-commerce has also reshaped employment: information-related services and digital products created new jobs requiring highly skilled workers, while retail, postal, and travel agency roles faced the steepest projected losses. On the environmental side, e-commerce generated 1.3 million short tons of container cardboard in North America in 2018. Amazon, identified as the largest single user of boxes, reduced its packaging material by 19% by weight since 2016 and maintained an 85-person team focused on packaging research. In 2019, the city of Hangzhou established an artificial intelligence-based Internet Court to adjudicate e-commerce disputes and internet-related intellectual property claims, a concrete institutional response to the scale of digital trade that earlier generations of lawmakers had not anticipated.