The evolution of technology leads to the born of social networks and E-commerce
First, we would like to guide you back to the history of the internet. From the very beginning, the demand of human beings to the internet has increased gradually, and the very first stage of which is to send and receive data from defined destinations. Moving on, the need for managing and displaying information to the others facilitated the born of websites and World Wide Web in the 1990s. A few years later, realizing the potential of internet, and the fact that personal computer and internet connection was becoming more approachable to many households, in 1996, Yahoo took a big step of being the global phenomena of a tool for every internet user to send messages instantly, and one of the foundation demands of society, communication, can then be done using the internet. This led to the big question at that moment, whether there will be a kind of “society” on the internet any time soon. Not having to wait long, Six Degrees, the website credited as being the “first social media” site was officially launched in 1997. For the first time, people can make individual profiles and add others to their personal networks. Although it later declined in 2001 when suffered from the “dot-com bubble”, it has placed a solid foundation for the upcoming giants in social networks — LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter. After nearly more than a decade of open publicly, in 2018, nearly 3.2 billion people across the globe, accounted for 42% of global population, have become active social media users. Moreover, this number is predicted to grow in the following years.
The inevitable appearance of e-commerce.
On the other hand, during the blooming of internet and websites, people start to think about ways to get profit out of the website, or utilize it to improve their business. It was not until Jeff Bezos’s Amazon delivered its first book in 1995 that people started to realize the potential of doing business on the internet. Within just a month, he had customers from all states of the US, and in 45 other countries as well, which is the unbelievable success for a new “online store”. Later on, many businessmen proposed that the ability to review is one of the most crucial features that contributed to the success of Amazon.
So at the moment, we have witnessed the starting point of B2C e-Commerce, in which people bought brand new books online. What about old stuff that individuals what to sell like in a fair? Surprisingly, it all began with a broken laser pointer of Pierre Omidyar in the same year of Amazon’s fame rising. He is a programmer wanted to test the idea of creating an online market for everyone to sell their things online quickly, and he coded AuctionWeb. His broken laser pointer was finally sold out within a day, and he knew his idea would fly.
The year 1995 has marked the era of e-Commerce in human history, and lead to a new trend that tremendously changes our shopping habits in the world today. Follow the flow of business demand and technology, many more online shopping sites were built consequently, led to the increase in online ads and the amount of money poured into them.
As the market growing, realizing the need space for more businesses to interact with customers, Amazon has then allowed 3rd parties to sell goods in their website, and began collaborating with several brands, and it didn’t take a long time to prove the effectiveness of this strategic move. Nowadays, Amazon is both a retailer and a marketplace for many businesses. At the same time, eBay decides to solely create a marketplace for separate entities to conduct business, especially for C2C market. Consequently, the founding of the B2B market portal is imminent, and in the US, eWorldTrade is one of the top B2B websites. LinkedIn, however, developed with a vision of empowering the economic opportunity of every individual in the workforce, was used as a tool to facilitate the finding of potential business partners in individual aspects only, not dedicatedly served business entities.
On the other part of the world, during the “dot-com bubble”, the global counterweight e-commerce empire in China started to form in 1999. Alibaba group has quickly established its region in e-Commerce in China, as it can cover all B2B, B2C, and C2C businesses by Alibaba, Aliexpress and Tmall respectively.
Although these empires operate across the globe, they cannot resist the evolution of technology. They all know that they stood on their victory, they will fall sooner or later. Therefore, they all kept innovating themselves by developing an ecosystem around their core products to ensure the profit they got is maximized and their customers are also get the highest experiences as possible. Amazon’s brand value is on the sweet moment thanks to the Amazon Prime ecosystem, to serve customers throughout the shopping process by well-developed marketing & promotional services, logistics & supply chains. On the contrary, Alibaba has also successfully created an ecosystem with the center of their e-Commerce platforms, including Alibaba Cloud, Alipay, Alimama, China Smart Logistics, and Alibaba Cloud.
As we can see, in developed countries, the evolution of technology is happening day by day, in which those businesses who cannot catch up with flow will lately be eliminated from such fierce competition. However, in developing areas, this flow of technology is not yet reached the stage that all kind of e-commerce is available, but rather just grow fast in one category, and for most of the cases like Vietnam, B2C market is witnessing a tremendous increase in sales volume and profit in recent years.
Michael Le — Phuc Pham
The Comspaces Team
