E-Commerce

Electronic commerce




Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists

of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as

the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted

electronically has grown dramatically since the spread of the Internet. A wide

variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations

in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online

transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management

systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce

typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction's

lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail

as well. e-commerce is buying things from the internet but many people are unsure

about its reliabilty as there are many unreputable vendors.

A small percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for

"virtual" items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic

commerce involves the transportation of physical items in some way. Online

retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is known as e-tail. Ecommerce

or electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of

e-business.

Early development

The meaning of "electronic commerce" has changed over the last 30 years. Originally, "electronic commerce"

meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data

Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both introduced in the late 1970s, allowing

businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. The growth and

acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms

of e-commerce. From the 1990s onwards, e-commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning

systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

Perhaps the earliest example of many-to-many electronic commerce in physical goods was the Boston Computer

Exchange, a marketplace for used computers launched in 1982. The first online information marketplace, including

online consulting, was likely the American Information Exchange, another pre-Internet online system introduced in

1991.

Web development

When the Web first became well-known among the general public in 1994, many journalists and pundits forecast

that e-commerce would soon become a major economic sector. However, it took about four years for security

protocols (like HTTPS) to become sufficiently developed and widely deployed. Subsequently, between 1998 and

2000, a substantial number of businesses in the United States and Western Europe developed rudimentary web

sites.

In the dot com era, e-commerce came to include activities more precisely termed "Web commerce" -- the purchase

of goods and services over the World Wide Web, usually with secure connections, with e-shopping carts and with

electronic payment services such as credit card payment authorizations.

Although a large number of "pure e-commerce" companies disappeared during the dot-com collapse in 2000 and

2001, many "brick-and-mortar" retailers recognized that such companies had identified valuable niche markets and

began to add e-commerce capabilities to their Web sites. For example, after the collapse of online grocer Webvan,

two traditional supermarket chains, Albertsons and Safeway, both started e-commerce subsidiaries through which

consumers could order groceries online.

The emergence of e-commerce also significantly lowered barriers to entry in the selling of many types of goods;

many small home-based proprietors are able to use the internet to sell goods. Often, small sellers use online auction

sites such as eBay, or sell via large corporate websites like Amazon.com, in order to take advantage of the exposure

and setup convenience of such sites.

$259 billion of online sales including travel are expected in 2007 in USA, an 18% increase from the previous year,

as forecasted by the "State of Retailing Online 2007" report from the National Retail Federation (NRF) and

Shop.org.[1]

Currently there are 67 Fortune 1000 companies that have ecommerce revenues greater than $10 million. The 5

largest Internet retailers are Amazon, Staples, Office Depot, Dell, and Hewlett Packard. This indicates that the top