This is an old subject but I think need newer thoughts. As we know

that the Internet was conceived in 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (a Department of Defense organization) funded research of computer networking. The World Wide Web emerged in 1990s. Ecommerce became possible in 1991 when the Internet was opened to commercial use. Since that date thousands of businesses have taken up residence at web sites.

If we check history of ecommerce, this referred to the invention of the very old notion of “sell and buy”. Internet began popularity in 1994 and in year 2000, lots of business in USA and Europe started their venture in internet and the terminology of ecommerce became popular. Although dot-com era collapsed in 2000 and lots of companies has vanished, the brick& mortar retailer understood the importance of ecommerce. By the end of 2001, the largest form of ecommerce, Business-to-Business (B2B) model, had around $700 billion in transactions. In next few years, ecommerce is become an important services for the user. Amazon who started with online book business, became one of the major players in the ecommerce. Dell took one step more and decided to sell their goods over online and became successful. As per available data, in year 2007, 3.4 percentages of total sales happen through ecommerce. Ecommerce has a great deal of advantages over “brick and mortar” stores and mail order catalogs.

Ecommerce is evolved in 2000 and till then there is not much change in the ecommerce sites except there is few sites come-up with web2.0 look and feel changes. Few companies come-up with new business model to accommodate local vendors. But if you see the functionality perspective there is no change happened till its inception and it seems that ecommerce sites does not take risk of introducing new functionality, I mean they want to continue with what they have. Currently there are hundreds of ecommerce sites available in the World and the basic functionality of any ecommerce sites is limited to “search” & “compare”. We need a great revolution around ecommerce in coming days with new ideas having a totally different look & feel, user experience. I will bet that it will rock and user will see the difference from cnet, amazon and dell. As per PEW internet report, million of internet users feels that current ecommerce sites are having lack of information and very poor user experience. So give a thought about next generation ecommerce.

I am going to start reviewing some of the upcoming ecommerce sites and will publish my comments in near future:

Review of ecommerce sites Shopnics.com