Online shopping is a major part of the overall electronic commerce, or e-commerce, industry which consists of all the buying and selling of goods and services over electronic systems such as the internet and other computers. Especially with the rise of the internet, the amount of trade that is conducted electronically has seen extraordinary growth, but before the widespread introduction of the internet to the general public in 1994, the term electronic commerce referred to the use of technologies such as electronic data interchange (EDI) and electronic funds transfer (EFT), that had been introduced already in the late 1970s, to facilitate business practices. With the rise of the World Wide Web many predicted the e-commerce would soon become a major economic sector, but security protocols such as HTTPS did not become secure enough for widespread use of such transactions until 1998. Nevertheless, there came along the dotcom bubble, which saw the emergence of the internet as a new economic sector, which collapsed when the bubble burst in 2000 and 2001. Despite this, many traditional brick-and-mortar retailers recognized the valuable markets identified during that time and took steps to add e-commerce capabilities to their own website. Thus, new methods of sending payments, such as e-shopping carts, electronic payment services and secured credit card payment authorizations became more widely used. And nowadays, online shopping in the Asia Pacific region is set to expand rapidly in coming years underpinned by rapid economic growth in this field and has many distinct and unique advantages and disadvantages which separate it from traditional retail shopping:
