Imagine for a moment that there are no concepts like e-commerce, credit cards, and forward sales, and you’re trading your precious cow for a small piece of land. Thus began the story of trade thousands of years ago.

What are the stages that trade has gone through, which is as old as human history, until today? Today, we are in the era of electronic commerce, where the seller and the customer do not have to meet face to face, but how did this whole process begin, how did we get today from barter shopping, we have summarized it for you in this article.

How did you start trading?

Trade, which arose as a result of people’s desire to meet their needs, developed and continued to exist since primitive societies. Although it first began to be spoken of as a concept in the fifteenth century, it was first defined and began to be used in the eighteenth century in the sense we use today. In the twentieth century, developments in industry and technology changed business life in a positive way.

When did money start to be used?

It is believed that the first trade appeared when people started exchanging the goods they produced in excess for the goods they needed. Later, people began to use means of exchange, such as shells, small tokens, and medals, which facilitated payment. These developments led to the use of money in a short time, and commerce, as we understand it today, began to take shape. The use of paper money appeared for the first time in 806 AD, before the use of coins minted on the skin.

Use a credit card

The term credit card was first used in Henry Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Back in 1887. However, its real-life use is considered 65 years later when Ralph Schneider and Frank McNamara implemented a card system called “The Diner’s Club” which could not It was only used in restaurants at that time. Credit cards are still one of the most important tools of e-commerce, and perhaps the innovation that has most influenced the concept of shopping.

When was the first e-commerce conducted?

What was the first e-commerce in history? Although experts do not offer a single opinion on this issue, many agree that the first electronic commerce was the drug trade. According to The Guardian, in the 1970s, Stanford students sold a bag of medicine to fellow MIT students using Arpanet accounts and the school’s AI lab. Although this is technically the first online shopping, Pizza Hut, which sold pizza to one person online in 1994, has the honor of being the first company to achieve e-commerce.

Due to the variety of their needs, humans, who used to live alongside trade, can shop from all over the world in this new era.