I would like to add to the answer given by my friend above. It is mainly about the development of e-commerce after the 1990s.

The development history of e-commerce can be traced back to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI, Electronic Data Interchange) before the emergence of the Internet, which refers to the use of electronic data interchange to transmit orders, invoices and other trade documents. With the popularization of the Internet and the development of core technologies, more and more enterprises are "connected to the Internet". Enterprise e-commerce has gone through five stages from simple to complex, from low-level to advanced:

First Stage, Yellow Pages type. The Internet provides enterprise or product yellow pages, replacing traditional communication media. Its advantages include easy use, new and abundant content, wide communication range, and low acquisition cost.

The second stage is advertising type. It replaces the traditional corporate brochure and adds multimedia content with a larger amount of information. It functions as an advertisement and establishes an equal communication channel for enterprises and consumers.

The third stage is sales. Instead of traditional sales methods, some products suitable for online sales began to move to the Internet, mainly out of considerations of reducing circulation links and operating costs, and because the Internet has incomparable advantages that other sales methods have. Currently, domestic Internet companies are mainly at this stage of development, such as B2C, B2B, etc.

The fourth stage is integration. The previous stages focused on export-oriented business platforms. In fact, internal e-commerce has existed since the era of simple computer word processing. Enterprise application layer software such as financial management, inventory management, personnel management, and decision-making management have never stopped being networked. step. With the powerful functions of server system management software, in order to save costs, more and more companies have adopted integrated solutions, ranging from product sales, recruitment, investment promotion, corporate publicity, after-sales service, technical support, cooperation intentions, etc. All content that can be made public is online. Consumers, employees, dealers, retailers, suppliers, and even managers can log in to a server with different roles and permissions, browse various related content, and conduct various activities, such as consultation, Purchasing, interviewing, organizing meetings, publishing news, interviews, etc. At this time, e-commerce truly became an enterprise application platform. It was no longer a so-called human-computer interactive platform, but a platform for people to communicate with each other. Consumers can go online to consult with on-duty technical support, dealers can go online to learn about production progress, and suppliers can go online to discuss business with purchasing managers. These customers do not need to know where their contacts are, they may be in the office or at home. , or even on vacation, the concept of virtuality was born, most of which are realized through network conferencing technology. The first thing employees do every day is to log on to the Internet, making it possible to work from home.

The fifth stage is online production and online consumption (POCO). This is the highest form of e-commerce.

In addition, according to research by e-commerce masters Kalakota and Whinston, e-commerce should at least include back-end business-to-business e-commerce (B2B) and front-end business-to-consumer e-commerce (B2C). Among them, the connotation of B2C includes: online advertising; catalog display of goods; establishment of virtual stores and sales (online shopping); customer data collection and marketing planning; one-to-one personalized marketing; customer service. This classification of e-commerce content or activity subjects can be used to analyze the above five stages.