The history of e-commerce dates back to the late 1940s and 1960s, when it initially involved the exchange of business documents and a system of placing orders via telex. The term came into use in the 1970s and 1980s.
English inventor Michael Aldrich is considered the father of modern e-commerce. In 1979, he created a shopping system that facilitated the processing of transactions between businesses and consumers using a computer network.
The first end-to-end e-commerce transaction is believed to have occurred in August 1994 .
Google Books Ngram Viewer suggests that the term really started to catch on around 1995. Not surprisingly, this was around the same time that Business Owner Data the internet was in its early stages of mass adoption. E-commerce, in its various abbreviated forms, has been a fixture of both online and offline literature ever since.
The Ngram viewer shows that the use of e-commerce is much more widespread than e-commerce. This gap is evident when you run a search query for either spelling. E-commerce revenue results in 3.5 billion results while e-commerce results in 1.47 billion results .
However, things take a different turn when you compare the two spellings on Google Trends, which reflects relative search interest. It shows that after several months of back-and-forth, e-commerce definitely overtook e-commerce in October 2005, and the gap has been steadily widening ever since.
There is a rational explanation for this difference between Ngram Viewer and Google Trends.
E-commerce is the grammatically correct spelling. It is the default used by all major dictionaries including Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster and Collins. ej leads Electronic commerce is also the preferred spelling of leading writing style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Style Guide. Therefore, Ngram Viewer represents the more academic usage of the word.
SEO implications of spelling variations
In 2019, this gap in usage frequency narrowed to 600%. Perhaps an indicator that an increasingly significant portion of industry players, researchers, leading cpa email list commentators, and ordinary internet users are leaning towards e-commerce. This evolving shift is consistent with Google Trends findings.
When it comes to SEO, Google and Is it e-commerce or e-commerce?