There was no e-commerce in the United States 50 years ago.

In 1991, the U.S. government opened the Internet to the public and allowed the development of commercial application systems online. In 1993, US President Clinton proposed a plan to build an information highway.

In 1994, US Vice President Al Gore further proposed the initiative of building a global information superhighway, which aroused strong response from countries around the world and led to a global network construction boom.

This period was the budding period of global e-commerce. During this period, with the rise of the Internet, many American Internet companies were established one after another. They gathered Internet browsers by providing information and attracting advertisers to place advertisements to earn revenue.

In 1995, the amount of commercial business information on the Internet exceeded the amount of scientific and educational business information for the first time, and e-commerce began to develop on a large scale.

In 1996, the two major international credit card organizations in the United States jointly initiated the formulation of the SET protocol to ensure secure electronic transactions on the Internet and was suitable for B2C models, and promoted it globally.

In 1997, the U.S. government formulated a global e-commerce market framework document to promote the development of free competition in global e-commerce. In addition, the United States and the European Union issued a joint declaration on e-commerce. That year, there were 20,000 online stores in the United States.

In early 1998, the U.S. government announced three draft tax-free policies to distinguish online shopping as a business form from traditional trade methods, and to use legal forms to protect the new e-commerce market. That year, the number of people shopping online in North America reached 1 million.

Beginning in 1998, the U.S. government passed a bill to require electronic payments for all federal government agency expenditures, accelerating the electronicization and networking of U.S. national finance.

E-commerce between enterprises and consumers (ie B2C) emerged during this period, and e-commerce entered the second stage of development. According to official U.S. data, B2C transaction volume in the fourth quarter of 1999 reached US$5.3 billion, accounting for 0.64% of total retail sales.

From 2000 to 2004, business-to-business e-commerce (ie B2B) emerged. Businesses conducted transactions through e-commerce to save costs and improve efficiency. E-commerce has entered the third stage of development. A 2000 survey by the American Domestic Manufacturing Association showed that 32% of manufacturers began to use e-commerce technology to conduct commercial transactions, and 80% of companies had their own website and conducted bidding, purchasing and other commercial activities through the Internet.

Since 2005, many large traditional enterprises in the United States have turned to e-commerce and tried to simplify business processes through the Internet to save costs and improve efficiency. Global e-commerce has ushered in the fourth stage of development.

In 2008, the establishment of Groupon in the United States created the online group buying model, that is, consumer-to-business e-commerce (C2B). The core of this model is to aggregate a large number of scattered consumers with the same purchasing intention to form a powerful purchasing group to buy in bulk from merchants, thereby changing the weak position of users in one-to-one bidding in the B2C model, which marks the global The development of e-commerce is moving towards the fifth stage.