After studying the history of electronic commerce and know about its early days, and the inventors of this technology, and after describing this technology and its features and functionalities and the impact that this technology has on the companies and individuals, it is the time now to talk about the future of this technology and what experts in the field expect.
Since the year 2000 and after the dot com boom that happened at that time, businesses are in a real race. Everyone wants to be the leader in his field, e-bay compete to stay the leader in B2C commerce and auctions field, the same for Amazon.com, they compete to stay the leader in selling books online, and many other examples, on the competing companies online.
Actually the future of electronic commerce is hardly predictable, since the technology progress is very fast and no one can expect what technology can be produced in the next five years. But of course the overall future of electronic commerce meets the initial goal that the electronic commerce was made for, which is "make transaction easier".
Bill Gates said that: "The future of computing is the computer that talks, listens, sees and learns. This is what is being created at Microsoft Research" which will make the transaction much easier than now.
Experts expect that in the next 10 years there will be no need for computer keyboard to make a purchase or to make a deal through the internet. Well, this is not so difficult with the voice recognition technology. All that you have to do is to open your computer, open your account on the site, and order the items you want orally. Of course this is one scenario of many other scenarios for the future of electronic commerce.
Some experts actually talk about extinction of physical commerce and a totally depend on the electronic commerce. People in general, tend to laziness and simplicity and the electronic commerce offers these both for customers. And when we talk about totally depends on the electronic commerce, this is hard to predict, because of some products that need to be exanimate before purchasing (e.g. vegetables and jewelry). And the indicator that prove that the electronic commerce dominate on the physical commerce is the increasing trend in the sales on the internet. The following diagram shows this increasing trend in the US.
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Since 2008 and even before, the number of deals and transaction done through internet and electronic commerce rises enormously. The sales levels of on-line retailers are hardly as good as the "brick-and-mortar" sales volumes. And as you can see in the diagram, it will continue, because most of the people nowadays are incarcerated in their offices and by the household chores, and the internet offers a huge opportunity in saving a lot of time and gives opportunity to make great deals by purchasing goods at the lowest prices. So we can conclude that the increasing in internet technology progress is the reason behind the increasing of electronic commerce sales.
From electronic commerce to mobile commerce:
Some specialists in the electronic commerce domain say that the next trend in the electronic commerce is the mobile commerce or m-commerce. This technology is part of e-commerce, and it has established since 1999. The big improvement in the wireless technology helps this trend to be the future trend of electronic commerce. And also making a transaction through direct e-commerce needs more hardware (computer, laptop …) than the mobile commerce.
After its establishment, m-commerce was considered a big opportunity to invest on and the telecommunication and the business entity are starting to consider the mobile commerce as a main spotlight for the electronic commerce future. Ghosh and Swaminatha, show that the international mobile commerce transactions were value more or less $200 billion in 2000 (in a statistic done in 2001), and it increased rapidly since that time. In the other hand the availability of connecting the internet technology to the mobile commerce technology is growing too.
And here we have to talk about the technological expected future of m-commerce (the future of e-commerce), which is affected by the establishment of 3G technology and 4G technology, that can connect multi diverse wireless networks. Before, the challenge was to make a local wireless network that will allow a transaction to be made through handled device, the next step in the future is to make a universal wireless network.
Why not? :
When we see this progress in the electronic commerce, and the advancement of technology in this domain, one can ask: what are they waiting to do it? Why don't they start now?
The answer on these questions and many other questions is divided into two parts:
The differences in technology improvement between countries (poor and rich countries)
The risk and the fear that some people have toward the electronic commerce.
About the first cause, no one can deny that the world nowadays is divided into north world and south world, in other words rich countries and poor countries. The improvement of technology in the rich countries is much bigger than the poor countries, so any new technology that affect the e-commerce will take a time to be implemented in the poor countries, and this will affect the speed of improving the electronic commerce transactions. But due to globalization, this problem won't be a barrier in next few years. The dispersion of technology is accelerating these days, because of the advanced transportation.
And about the second point, many people especially the old people, are afraid from using the electronic commerce as a tool to make a transaction, because of many reasons. One of these reasons is the security issues. Most of people are afraid to put their personal data and passwords, on the internet especially when they deal with virtual companies, and this is a reasonable fear, since the internet is crowded with hackers and thieves. But this is not a reason to district the e-commerce. The electronic commerce sites are trying to solve this problem by many ways, such as digital certificates, and insurance signs.
At the end the future of electronic commerce is hard to be predicting as we said, no one can know what the advanced technology carries for the electronic commerce technology.
