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Ecommerce, like all other facets of life, has undergone many changes since its inception as a mainstream marketing and sales medium. Its growth over the last 15 years has seen massive profits and greater opportunity for merchants and consumers. Let’s take a look at the evolution of ecommerce broken into four separate generations:

The first generation of ecommerce involved direct business to consumer sales online. The trend began in 1995 and the most notable entrant to the market was Amazon.com, the first large online retailer not to have a physical retail outlet. The concept was simple, to sell your products online directly to the consumer.

The second generation of ecommerce, prompted by online auctions sites such as ebay, was the introduction of consumer-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce online. Auction sites like ebay allowed ordinary consumers to sell to others directly, with a very simple business model. This in turn allowed businesses to sell directly to other businesses.

The third generation of ecommerce was prompted by Yahoo, which took the existing business to consumer and consumer to consumer model one step further and setup a super online mall. This was a single large market online, which sold everything you could possibly want. The sheer variety was possible because of the combination of businesses and consumers both selling products in one single searchable location. This generation also saw the introduction of individual storefronts for small merchants.

The fourth generation of ecommerce saw the introduction in 2009 of business-to-business to consumer-to-consumer commerce. The concept is simple; it allowed consumers to sell goods and services to other consumers without actually maintaining inventory of their own. A business would manufacture products, which would be sold through another business to a consumer who in turn sells it to the final consumer.

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