Ecommerce

Ecommerce
In its simplest terms, Ecommerce or E-commerce or eCommerce – how ever which way the word shows up, is an interchange of goods or commodities (products or services) that is very similar to any kind of commerce that exists. It differs from the other types of commerce such as foreign commerce and domestic commerce on only two attributes. One, ecommerce can be both accomplished on foreign and domestic scales; and two, it accommodates every kind of trader, from those trading in small, medium and large scale businesses, to those in micro businesses.

Foreign and domestic commerce both happens on a large scale basis. Foreign commerce is between different countries, while domestic commerce happens with business entities between different parts of the same country. Ecommerce is a fusion of the words “electronic” and “commerce.” This basically means that all transactions happen over the electronic systems like the Internet or other computer networks - a good example of which is stock brokering, where most of the transactions from bidding to selling can happen via computer links inside and outside the stock markets. The word “ecommerce” has existed way before the Internet, busting the idea that this type of commerce existed only on the onset of the World Wide Web.

The fact is that the original ecommerce or electronically charged commerce was first introduced on the onset of commercial billings over the phone lines and the automation of teller machines. Therefore, any form of business transaction that happened using the wires – phone lines, telegraph line, machine based transactions, etc. – were once considered ecommerce. Even when the Internet became accessible to the public, the term “ecommerce” was not immediately associated with it. That is, not until the development of HTML processes where business transactions became viable as a form of trade.