It took more than five years for trading on the Web to become a viable reality. From the instigation of the Web in 1995 young entrepreneurs with a little knowledge and even less business experience put the wheels on the bandwagon. For the next five years they excited the venture capitalists and emptied their coffers, until their lack of busines accumen and the public's natural cautiousness over the security of personal information combined to create the "dot com bubble" crash of 1999-2000.
Since then, security has been at the centre of development efforts, to the extent that e-commerce is now a multi-billion pound activity. We hear regularly of high street shops and chains closing down because of competition from web-based competitors such as Amazon, Dell and eBay, and more than 60% of Christmas gifts were bought via the Internet last year. There is still some way to go to beat the thieves and fraudsters entirely, but already they find there are easier pickings by way of spoof websites, spam and trojans.
e-Commerce is no longer a novelty, it has become seamlessly absorbed into our social structure in the same way as mobile 'phones and credit cards. For businesses, on-line trading is no longer a luxury, it is an essential symbol of a company's strategic position in the trading community as well as a route to increased efficiency, profitability and competitiveness.