E-commerce is short for electronic commerce. This is doing business like buying and selling over the Internet or other computer networks.
Since the rapid development of the Internet, many companies have engaged in this practice. Some use it for electronic funds transfer; Internet marketing, electronic data interchange (EDI), automated data collection systems and many more.
The most popular way to facilitate e-commerce is through the World Wide Web (WWW), however, the process can also be done through e-mail.
In the 1970's, e-commerce was supposed to be just about the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically using Electronic Data Interchange and Electronic Funds Transfer.
By the 1980's, there was a growth in payments through credit cards, automated teller machines and telephone banking. The 1990's included Enterprise Resource Planning systems, data mining and data warehousing. However, it was in 1994 when the World Wide Web became well known to the public. Although at that time, the security protocols (like HTTPS) were not yet competently developed.
After four years, the World Wide Web had been sufficiently developed and became the venue of web-commerce. There were already e-shopping carts and electronic payments available through credit cards.
As said, most electronic commerce consists of the buying and selling of physical items including its handling and transportation. Physical items can include appliances, furniture, books, cosmetics and fashion items for example. While a small percentage focuses on virtual items or premium contents on a web site, such as music downloads, video downloads or some software program.
Some also ventured out to online retailing or e-tail. Today, almost all of the big retailers already have e-commerce in the World Wide Web.
The top five Internet retailers are Amazon, Office Depot, Staples, Hewlett Packard and Dell. This just shows that the top selling products are books, office supplies, music, and computers. In addition, companies that sell through the Internet already facilitate all the aspects of the transaction, from transportation to how the payment will be done.
E-commerce can also be referred to as Business to business (B2B) since it is open to all interested parties.
Forms of e-commerce come from the consumer and institutional level. As have been discussed, the consumer level transactions are done through the WWW. This can be from inexpensive items to expensive items like real estate.
Online banking consists of bill payments, stock buying, wire payments and funds transfer. Institutional level e-commerce is used for exchanging financial data for businesses. Due to the rapid development and popularity of the Internet, almost everything is just a click away.
