Infographic | The Evolution of E-Commerce

The good folks at ZippyCart.com, the reviews and comparison site for e-commerce shopping carts, have put together a nice infographic (below) summarizing the evolution of e-commerce, providing a context and pointing to four trends patterning e-commerce today and in the future – social commerce, group buy, private sales and mobile commerce. Click the infographic for a larger version.

The ZippyCart infographic reads well with John Provisor’s (e-commerce specialists Guidance) white paper From eCommerce to We-Commerce: The Social Evolution of eCommerce (download).

We’re old enough to be fans of Sting – so we’d have have bumped Pizza Hut off the infographic for the first ever [secure] e-commerce transaction in 1994 – the sale of Stings CD “Ten Summoner’s Tales” for $12.48, plus shipping, on August 14, 1994 on NetMarket.  But we like pizza too.

It’s up for debate whether group-buy and private-sale ‘clubs’ are distinct from, or fall within within social commerce – we’d include them as components of social commerce – but not social shopping (sharing the act of shopping), as clubs and groups are by definition social.

But sterile definitional debates aside – it’s a lovely infographic and great backgrounder  for [social] e-commerce workshops.