E-commerce

Ecommerce, also known as electronic commerce, comprises mainly of trading of services or products over the electronic systems such as Internet or other similar computer networks. The ecommerce has a increasing growth over the past few years due to the fast and widespread internet growth. The electronic era has contributed widely to the growth of ecommerce, spurring on innovations in supply chain management, electronic funds transfer online, electronic data interchange, online transactions and the automated data collection systems. The modern ecommerce makes a wide use of World Wide Web, although it also uses a wider range of technologies such as email also.

A major percentage of electronic commerce is electronically conducted for many virtual items and services such as accessing premium content on certain websites, though most of the transaction also involves a physical transaction as well. The online retailers also called e-tailors have a presence of ecommerce on the World Wide Web. The electronic commerce that is held between the business companies is known as business to business or B2B. It is open to all the parties interested in the transaction such as commodity exchange or it may be limited to some pre qualified participants. The ecommerce conducted between businesses and consumers is called B2C. This type of commerce is conducted by the big companies such as Amazon.com. This is considered to be the main sales aspect of the blooming e-business. It consists of exchanging the data in order to felicitate the payment and financing aspects of the business transactions.

There have been many developments in the field of ecommerce over the past few decades. Earlier, it used the technology such as Electronic data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic funds transfer (EFT). These two technologies were introduced in the late 1970’s and allowed the transfer of the commercial documents like invoices and purchase orders electronically between the businesses.  The new technologies that entered the market later were Automated Teller machines (ATM), telebanking and the credit card system. The other forms of electronic commerce were the airline reservation system in the USA and UK and were used extensively by the major auto manufacturers such as General motors, Ford, Nissan, etc. in the late 1990’s the ecommerce also included data mining, data warehousing and ERP. With the popularity of the WWW, it took around five years to introduce the new security protocols and DSL. Since then many people began to use this ecommerce in the purchasing of various goods through the internet using the various electronic payment services such as PayPal and moneybookers and other secure protocols.