For those who start to learn on e-commerce might wondering what is the definition of e-commerce. Many people who plunge into online business actually have applied e-commerce for their whole life without even study about it. That’s what e-commerce is all about, it already among us for long, it develop as the human needs grow.
The term e-Commerce stands for electronic commerce and refers to any form of business transaction in which the parties interact electronically rather than by physical exchanges or direct physical contact. The term covers buying and selling products and services as well as financial transactions like booking travel , trading stocks or banking online, renting games or movies.
Ecommerce definitions from the experts
Vladimir Zwass
“Ecommerce is the sharing of business information maintaining business relationships, and the conducting business transactions by means of telecommunication networks”
According to Zwass ecommerce includes not only selling or buying goods over the world wide web, but also various business processes within individual organization that support the goal.
G. Winfield Treese and Lawrence C. Stewart
“Ecommerce is the use of the global internet for purchase and sale of goods and services, including service and support after the sale. The internet may be an efficient mechanism for advertising and distributing product information, but our focus is on enabling complete business transactions. Electronic commerce includes the use of computing and communication technologies in financial business, online airline reservation, order processing, inventory management etc. Historically speaking, the best known idea in electronic commerce has been Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) …”
Daniel Minoli and Emma Minoli
Electronic commerce is any purchasing or selling though an electronic communication medium. Internet based commerce, in general, and web based commerce in particular are important sub-disciplines of electronic commerce. It is the symbiotic integration of communications, data management, and security capabilities to allow business applications within different organizations to automatically exchange information related to the sale of goods and services.
Frederick J Riggings and Heyun-Suk Rhee
The two experts define e-commerce into several domains as follows.
#1 Internal and Technology Enhanced
Improve coordination with internal business units
#2 Internal and Technology Facilitated
Information exchange to work with new team members
#3 External and Technology Enhanced
Improve coordination with existing trading partners
#4 External and Technology Facilitated
Market creation to reach new customers
Based on above e-commerce’s domains category thus we can summarize that is internal category of e-commerce mostly related to intranet intra-organizational and intranet business to business while external category of e-commerce mostly related to intranet business-to-business and internet customer to business.
So, what is e-commerce once again?
Based on the experts view above we can conclude that the term of e-commerce is related to business that is conducted over the Internet utilizing any of the applications that depend on the Internet or computer networks, such as instant messaging, e-mail, web services, shopping carts, FTP, EDI, and UDDI, among others. Electronic commerce can be between two businesses dispatching funds, services, goods, and/or data or between a customer and a business.
