Electronic commerce, popularly called Ecommerce or e-commerce or ecommerce refers to a concept of trading via electronic means, chiefly Internet. Ecommerce is a broad concept which can be summarized as exchanging as exchanging business data between two or more business companies. The concept of E-commerce developed from sub-concepts of technologies like online transactions, online data exchange, and internet advertising. If telephones, social media, e-mail and anything to do with wire are used in conducting commerce rather than traditional face-to-face methods, then it is called Ecommerce. Ecommerce is a subset of E-business.
Michael Aldrich was the one who developed online shopping for the first time in 1979 marking the first step towards the development of Ecommerce. In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee developed www and when Pierre Omidyar founded eBay and Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com in 1995, the use of Ecommerce boosted up.
The most common functions of ecommerce are:
- Buying and selling of goods online.
- Conduct secure business transactions.
- Transfer of funds via internet.
- Advertising of company's products to potential customers.
- Recognizing global trends by gathering demographic data through WWW.
- Making deals and agreements between two or more companies via teleconferencing.
Ecommerce has been helpful in many other fields which are listed as follows:
- Stock management
- E-tickets
- Newsgroup and social networking.
- Group buying and online shopping.
- E-banking
- Teleconferencing