e-commerce

Commerce that is transacted electronically, as over the Internet.

(Electronic-COMMERCE) Doing business online, typically via the Web. It is also called "e-business," "e-tailing" and "I-commerce." Although in most cases e-commerce and e-business are synonymous, e-commerce implies that goods and services can be purchased online, whereas e-business might be used as an umbrella term for a total presence on the Web, which would include the e-commerce shopping component.

E-commerce may also refer to electronic data interchange (see EDI), in which one company's computer queries the inventory and transmits purchase orders to another company's computer. See m-commerce, microcommerce and clicks and mortar.

The First E-Commerce?

In 1886, a telegraph operator was able to obtain a shipment of watches that was refused by the local jeweler. Using the telegraph, he sold all the watches to fellow operators and railroad employees and then ordered more. Within a short time, he made enough money to quit his job and start his own catalog mail order business. The young man's name was Richard Sears, who formed Sears, Roebuck and Co. in 1893.

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A type of business model, or segment of a larger business model, that enables a firm or individual to conduct business over an electronic network, typically the internet. Electronic commerce operates in all four of the major market segments: business to business, business to consumer, consumer to consumer and consumer to business.

Investopedia Says:
ECommerce has allowed firms to establish a market presence, or to enhance an already larger market position, by allowing for a cheaper and more efficient distribution chain for their products or services. One example of a firm having successfully used eCommerce is Chapters, which not only has physical stores, but an online store where the customer can buy books, CDs and DVDs.

Related Links:
E-tailing has changed the way consumers do nearly everything. Do you know how to pick the best retailer? Choosing The Winners In The Click-And-Mortar Game

Buying and selling on the Internet. Also called e-commerce, it has three subcategories: business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and consumer-to-consumer (C2C).

Business transactions conducted via electronic means; most often referring to Internet-based relationships between customers and vendors, but also including CD-ROM catalogs; also called internet marketing. The Internet, direct marketing's newest channel, has provided an unprecedented opportunity on a global basis for businesses to interact with, reach out to, and be accessible by their customers without limitations with respect to physical location or time zone. E-commerce practitioners utilize the Internet to disseminate company or product information, generate leads, take orders, and build customer databases. CD-ROM catalogs permit the distribution of vast amounts of personalized product information via a cost efficient medium. Business-to-business sales are expected to dominate e-commerce by 2003 reaching $1.3 trillion, whereas consumer sales are projected to be $108 billion. Electronic commerce may be adopted more readily by buyers of services and products such as software, information, and photos, because these items can be both sold and distributed over the Internet.

The buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet, especially the World Wide Web. In practice, this term and a new term, "e-business," are often used interchangeably. For on-line retail selling, the term e-tailing is sometimes used. It is also called e-commerce for short, on-line commerce, Internet commerce, e-business, or Cyberspace commerce. E-commerce can be divided into: (1) e-tailing or "virtual storefronts" on Web sites with on-line catalogs, sometimes gathered into a "virtual mall." The gathering and use of demographic data through Web contacts; (2) Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), the business-to-business exchange of data; (3) e-mail and fax and their use as media for reaching prospects and established customers (for example, with newsletters); (4) business-to-business buying and selling; and (5) the security of business transactions.

"No single force embodies our electronic transformation more than the evolving medium known as the Internet. Internet technology is having a profound effect on the global trade in services," according to a White House paper in 1997. Electronic commerce is estimated to have been in the range of $63 billion in 1999 and is expected to soar to $1,444 trillion by 2003 (For rester Research, 1999). Electronic commerce is a broad term describing business activities with as sociated technical data that are conducted electronically. It is an entire set of different, digitally enabled activities that are progressively replacing the more traditional brick-and-mortar commercial functions. While the wider phenomenon of "electronization of economic activities" encompasses the digitalization of all processes of economic wealth generation—including economic analysis, production, storage, information provisioning, marketing, and so on—it is the area of sales and related processes facilitated by electronic media that have been popularly termed "electronic commerce." Consequently within the more general phenomenon of digitalization of modern life, we find its most important component electronic commerce.

New Ways of Doing Business

Corporate, not-for-profit, and governmental sys tems are incorporating many increasingly digitalized processes that are leading to astounding productivity gains in the world economy because these processes are becoming less expensive, less time consuming, and more useful ("Why the Productivity Revolution," 2000). For example, a directory-assistance call formerly required an operator, look-up in paper-based directories, and a localized search. Now it involves a national (or international) computer database, voice synthesis, and automatic connection. Furthermore, the process has been expanded; one can do reverse searches through the Internet that will point to the owner of a telephone number, link this to one's telephone bill, and not involve any individual as the service provider. Thousands of "system processes" are undergoing this type of mutation, leading to cheaper, less time-consuming, and expanded types of services. Figure 1 shows several components of the business process (e.g., marketing) and electronic commerce tools (e.g., Web banners) that are structurally changing ways of doing business.

The marketing, advertising, and care triad are the core of the phenomenon. One-to-one marketing (whereby large customer databases link much information about clients, thus creating very efficient leads) is linked to very tailored advertising: The firm knows the client when he or she is connected to the Internet, and it fires off a series of individually targeted banners catering very closely to the client's needs. These advertising banners can explore the geography of the client at that moment (for example, if in a car, the closest gas station, drug store, or sports bar), linkages among products or recent purchase (bought a computer, needs parts and software), personal factors (getting married, needing a dress, birthday, death in the family), and other factors. The e-care part of the triad is the emerging process of the new organization. Technologically rich products need superior, technologically based support. E-care—a mix of e-mail, Web based support, and, when essential, phone sup port—is cheaper and more powerful if properly done than the traditional means. Organizations are finding that the same stringent standards of traditional care must be applied in the e-organization.

The electronic commerce revolution is in its initial phases and will progressively take over all processes either directly or indirectly. The distinction between "snail" commerce and e-commerce will disappear, with all processes be coming either digital or aided by digital supporting processes. The pace of this transformation is what differentiates winning from losing competitors, industries, and investors. The intrinsic nature of the product and processes, as well as the dynamics and resistance to change of corporations and industries, will determine the pace of change and the gains in productivity. Together with the telephone, railroads, and electricity, the Internet is one of the major agents of change of modern life.

Two major factors affect the speed of change in terms of product: (1) bitability and (2) e-commoditization. A product is bitable or not. If it can be transmitted over the Internet, the product (or service) is bitable. Software, information, remote support services, banking, bro kerage, and insurance, for example, fall into this category. If a product is bitable it does not ultimately have to be physically delivered, although it may take some time to acquire sufficient bandwidth or get consumers used to the idea. The e-commoditization factor is more complex. An e-commodity is an item that one does not need to touch, see, try on, try out, taste, or squeeze before buying. Clearly high-fashion clothes, cars, foods, meats, vegetables, and girlfriends tend not to fall into this category. On the other hand, this is very much a question of attitude and need. Busy executives will forgo the examination of food items for the convenience of having them at home when they arrive there. Once a teenager has tried on an item of brand-name clothing for size, it becomes a commodity, since sizes tend to be quality controlled. A buyer who lives in a very remote location may consider an item to be a commodity because the cost of its examination does not warrant extensive travel—and, in the case of clothes, they can be altered. Ultimately, bitable goods and bitable commodity goods present the highest potentials for e-commerce.

Research predicts that there will be a wide range of business expansion on the Internet. This is reflected on Figure 2, which incorporates a series of predictions from four different organizations.

Travel and apparel are expected to be the largest B2C (business to consumer) areas. At the same time, the volumes of B2B (business to business) trade are expected to be six to ten times larger than B2C, but with much narrower margins.

Emerging Principles of Electronic Commerce

An entirely new set of principles of commerce is emerging. First is the realization that a Malthusian physical world is giving way to a place where information is abundant and eyeballs limited. Second is the realization that paradoxes exist because of technology, and that giving things away for free, not protecting software against privacy, and paying for visitors, may be the paradigms of the e-world. Third, the meaning of the words competitor and industry are changing. In the faceless world of the Internet, one's current and future customers and suppliers are both one's competitors and one's allies. Fourth, industries are blending and changing, and affiliation agreements allow for the creation of entire product cycles without the ownership of inventory or production facilities. Finally, pricing models are changing; hybrids of fixed pricing, auctions, variable pricing, contingent pricing, and name-your-price pricing are emerging and creating new business models. While technology gets most of the credit, actually successes are usually based on the triad of: (1) technology, (2) business model innovation, and (3) a family of facilitating (profitable) services. (See Figure 3)

The B2B sector of e-commerce will present both vertical and horizontal models. In the vertical model, the firm will focus on an industry and develop great industry expertise in order to develop its markets. In the horizontal model the firm will focus on one type of product or service and offer it across industries (e.g., Internet payroll services). The B2B sector is intrinsically different from B2C. Buyers are well informed, possess many resources and can negotiate based on volume. Brand name is much less of a consideration than price, quality, delivery time, and reliability. Three different models have emerged for B2B transactions: (1) the e-catalog model for situations in which there are many different items at distributed locations and the price is fixed (e.g., auto parts); (2) the auction model, in which products are not standardized and there are great differences in the perceptions of value (e.g., auctions of used capital plant products); and (3) the commodity auction model, in which there are not too many variations on the type of product and there are large buyers and sellers (e.g., natural gas, pork bellies, coffee, etc.).

Electronic commerce is progressively and irreversibly changing the face of many businesses because of three dominant phenomena: (1) disintermediation, whereby one party to a transaction is eliminated (e.g., brokers in on-line trading); (2) re-intermediation, whereby a new electronic intermediary comes between the seller and the buyer (e.g., electronic booksellers that take orders and farm them out to providers that have the book in stock); and (3) cannibalization, whereby businesses progressively give up their traditional brick-and-mortar ventures for the superior electronic model (e.g., traditional pharmacies opening on-line drug stores).

Problems in Search of Solutions

The e-commerce juggernaut is not without its dangers and shortcomings. It is drastically affecting traditional firms that cannot continue to do business according to the traditional economic model. For example, a stock brokerage firm that on average charged $90 per trade cannot compete with $10 on-line trades; if any adaptations meet with strong resistance, the organization could be dooming itself to extinction. The security weaknesses of the e-commerce infrastructure have been well publicized: Viruses, security intrusions, and inability to provide services because of volume attacks are not phenomena that will disappear. A continuous struggle is evolving among facilitating technologies, intrinsic technological dangers, and the management of these factors.

Privacy issues present a different set of challenges. The same technology that facilitates business activities and provides wonderful services is also a major threat to individual freedom. Large databases linking information about economic activity from different sources (purchases, banking activity, medical records) provide great economic advantages by making marketing more efficient, loans more targeted, and medical information ubiquitous. They also create great dangers for privacy potentials for abuse. Doubleclick.com, a marketing analysis technology firm, tracks customer activities in Web sites. Its click-path analysis allows firms to understand customer behavior and improve their offerings. However they have 11,000 clients, and linking together the buyers' profiles from these sites is considered to be far too intrusive by many people. Complaints have been filed with the Federal Trade Commission and boycotts proposed. As a response, Doubleclick lured bigger profile "primary" officers for its board."

Solutions, however, are not as straightforward as they might seem. Making certain actions illegal can actually create arbitrage opportunities and extraordinary advantages for Internet players. Because gambling rules are strict in the United States, electronic casinos are created in cooperative havens in the Bahamas: A legal obstacle in the United States is a business opportunity for another country. When restrictions are placed on the use and content of databases in Germany, offshore database havens appear immediately. When Web-site censorship appears in China, free-Chinese Web sites are constructed. Telephone systems are monitored and taxed by PTTs, supranational satellite telephone networks are being created.

Consequently, easy fixes are not possible and new methods of establishing order, efficiency, and decency will have to be created. Because the Internet is truly a supranational entity, nations need to band together to maintain order and efficiency and reasonableness in cyberspace. The same economic factors that allow for arbitrage can also be used for self-policing and monitoring of the e-commerce environment. To benefit fully from this medium, companies/entities and nations must have payment-clearing solutions, customs solutions, and access to the large markets of the economy. Rogue countries can be excluded from the payment-clearing chains; rogue companies behaving in unacceptable ways can be boycotted and excluded from any affiliation and linking deals. Self-policing seals such as the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' (AICPA) Web Trust and SysTrust products, inspections, and certificates can be used for monitoring and supervision. International information structures, involving many cooperating organizations, can be on the alert for rogue behavior and spearhead a drive to create reasonable and unbiased rules. Technology can be used to monitor and detect money laundering, illegal product flows, and information trafficking. But such monitoring must be carefully conceived and supervised, because it could turn into a "Big Brother" type of behavior. Most important of all is not to succumb to the easy temptation of creating restrictive and ill-thought-out laws of the sort that legislators tend to create when some local scandal occurs.

Bibliography

American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. (1999). SysTrust (TM/SM) Principles and Criteria for Systems Reliability.

American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. (updated annually). CPA WebTrust: Practitioner's Guide for Business to Consumer Electronic Commerce.

Forrester Research. (1999, November).

Kilmer, William E. (1999). Getting Your Business Wired: Using Computer Networking and the Internet to Grow your Business. New York: AMACOM.

Rosen, Anita. (2000). The e-Commerce Question and Answer Book: A Survival Guide for Business Managers. New York: American Management Association.

U.S. Government's Framework for Electronic Commerce, The. (1997, July 1). The White House, http://www.ecommerce.gov/framewrk.htm#BACKGROUND.

"Why the Productivity Revolution Will Spread." (2000). Business Week. February 14. http://www.businessweek.com.

[Article by: MIKLOS A. VASARHELYI]

For more information on e-commerce, visit Britannica.com.

Electronic Commerce, or e-commerce, is the conduct of business by electronic means. Following this general definition, e-commerce began soon after Samuel Morse sent his first telegraph message in 1844, and it expanded across the sea when another message, containing share price information from the New York stock market, linked Europe and North America in 1858. By 1877, Western Union, the dominant telegraph company, moved $2.5 million worth of transactions annually among businesses and consumers, and news companies led by Reuters sold financial and other information to customers around the world. The telephone permitted electronic voice transactions and greatly extended the reach of retail companies like Sears, whose mail-and telephone-order catalog helped to create genuine national firms.

In the twenty-first century, e-commerce referred more specifically to transactions between businesses (B2B e-commerce) and between businesses and consumers (B2C e-commerce) through the use of computer communication, particularly the Internet. This form of electronic commerce began in 1968, when what was called Electronic Data Interchange permitted companies to carry out electronic transactions. However, it was not until 1984 that a standardized format (known as ASC X12) provided a dependable means to conduct electronic business, and it was not until 1994 that Netscape introduced a browser program whose graphical presentation significantly eased the use of computer communication for all kinds of computer activity, including e-commerce.

To take advantage of the widespread adoption of the personal computer and the graphical browser, Jeff Bezos in 1995 founded Amazon.com to sell books and eventually a full range of consumer items over the Internet. Amazon went public in 1997 and in 2000 earned $2.76 billion in revenue, though its net loss of $417 million troubled investors. Other booksellers followed quickly, notably Barnes and Noble, whose web subsidiary—begun in 1997—also experienced rapid revenue growth and steep losses. One of the most successful e-commerce companies, eBay, departed from traditional retail outlets by serving as an electronic auction site or meeting place for buyers and sellers, thereby avoiding expensive warehousing and shipping costs. Its earnings derive from membership and transaction charges that its participants pay to join the auction. The company's profit of $58.6 million in 2000 made it one of the few to show a positive balance sheet. Other notable consumer e-commerce firms like the "name your own price" company Priceline.com and the online stock trading company E*TRADE suffered significant losses. Despite the backing of the New York Times, the financial news site The Street.com also failed to live up to expectations and eliminated most of its staff. Others did not manage to survive, notably the online-community firm theglobe.com, which received strong startup support in 1998, and Value America, which sold discounted general merchandise and enjoyed the backing of Microsoft's cofounder Paul Allen and the FedEx corporation.

The business-to-business form of e-commerce fared better in 2000 and 2001, although a faltering economy lowered expectations. B2B e-commerce evolved with the development of the Internet. One of the leading B2B firms, i2 Technologies, was founded in 1988 as a business software producer to help companies manage inventories electronically. As the Internet expanded, the role of i2 grew to include the procurement and management of all the elements required to produce finished goods. Successful in this endeavor, its revenue grew to $1.1 billion and its profit to $108 billion in 2000. Another form of B2B e-commerce involves managing a market for firms in specific industries. VerticalNet, founded in 1995, links producer goods and services markets, earning money on commissions it receives for deals struck using its electronic marketplace. Other market-creating firms focus on specific products. These include Pantellos in the utilities industry, ChemConnect in chemicals, and Intercontinental Exchange for oil and gas. Concerned about this trend, manufacturers began creating their own electronic purchasing markets, the largest of which, Covisint, was founded in 2000 by General Motors, Ford, and Daimler Chrysler. In its first year of operation, the company managed the purchasing of $129 billion in materials for the automobile industry. Other B2B companies have concentrated on the services sector, with consulting (Sapient) and advertising (DoubleClick) somewhat successful, and health services (Healthion/WebMD) less so.

By 2001, electronic commerce had not grown to levels anticipated in the late 1990s. In addition to a decline in economic growth, there remained uncertainties, particularly in relation to the consumer sector. Buyers were slower than expected to change habits and make the shift from going to a store to shopping on a computer. Concerns about privacy and security remained, although some progress was made in setting national and international regulations. Businesses remained reluctant to guarantee strict privacy protection because selling information about customers was a valuable part of the e-commerce business. Nevertheless, business-to-business sales continued to grow and companies that developed their electronic sales divisions slowly over this period and carefully integrated their e-commerce and conventional business practices appeared to be more successful. Forecasters remained optimistic, anticipating the $657 billion spent worldwide on e-commerce in 2000 to double in 2001 and grow to $6.8 trillion by 2004.

Bibliography

Frank, Stephen E. NetWorth: Successful Investing in the Companies that Will Prevail through Internet Booms and Busts. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.

Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic, 1999.

Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.

Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's Online Pioneers. New York: Walker, 1998.

—Vincent Mosco

Electronic Commerce

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Electronic Commerce, commonly known as (electronic marketing) e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction's lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.

A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce involves the transportation of physical items in some way. Online retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is sometimes known as e-tail. Almost all big retailers have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web.

Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market). Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses and consumers, on the other hand, is referred to as business-to-consumer or B2C. This is the type of electronic commerce conducted by companies such as Amazon.com.

Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of the business transactions.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Early development 1.2 Timeline 2 Business applications 3 Government regulations 4 Forms 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links

History

Early development

The meaning of electronic commerce has changed over the last 30 years. Originally, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of electronic commerce. Another form of e-commerce was the airline reservation system typified by Sabre in the USA and Travicom in the UK. Online shopping was invented in the UK in 1979 by Michael Aldrich^{[citation needed]} and during the 1980s it was used extensively particularly by auto manufacturers such as Ford, Peugeot-Talbot, General Motors and Nissan. From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

The earliest^{[citation needed]} example of many-to-many electronic commerce in physical goods was the Boston Computer Exchange, a marketplace for used computers launched in 1982. The first^{[citation needed]} online information marketplace, including online consulting, was likely the American Information Exchange, another pre-Internet^{[clarification needed]} online system introduced in 1991.

Until 1991, commercial enterprise on the Internet was strictly prohibited.^[1] Although the Internet became popular worldwide around 1994, it took about five years to introduce security protocols and DSL allowing continual connection to the Internet. And by the end of 2000, a lot of European and American business companies offered their services through the World Wide Web. Since then people began to associate a word "ecommerce" with the ability of purchasing various goods through the Internet using secure protocols and electronic payment services.

Timeline

• 1990: Tim Berners-Lee writes the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, using a NeXT computer.
• 1992: J.H. Snider and Terra Ziporyn publish Future Shop: How New Technologies Will Change the Way We Shop and What We Buy. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312063598.
• 1994: Netscape releases the Navigator browser in October under the code name Mozilla. Pizza Hut offers pizza ordering on its Web page. The first online bank opens. Attempts to offer flower delivery and magazine subscriptions online. Adult materials also becomes commercially available, as do cars and bikes. Netscape 1.0 is introduced in late 1994 SSL encryption that made transactions secure.
• 1995: Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com and the first commercial-free 24 hour, internet-only radio stations, Radio HK and NetRadio start broadcasting. Dell and Cisco begin to aggressively use Internet for commercial transactions. eBay is founded by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb.
• 1998: Electronic postal stamps can be purchased and downloaded for printing from the Web.
• 1999: Business.com sold for US $7.5 million to eCompanies, which was purchased in 1997 for US $149,000. The peer-to-peer filesharing software Napster launches. ATG Stores launches to sell decorative items for the home online.
• 2000: The dot-com bust.
• 2002: eBay acquires PayPal for $1.5 billion ^[2]. Niche retail companies CSN Stores and NetShops are founded with the concept of selling products through several targeted domains, rather than a central portal.
• 2003: Amazon.com posts first yearly profit.
• 2007: Business.com acquired by R.H. Donnelley for $345 million^[3].
• 2008: US eCommerce and Online Retail sales projected to reach $204 billion, an increase of 17 percent over 2007^[4].

Business applications

Some common applications related to electronic commerce are the following:

• Email
• Enterprise content management
• Instant messaging
• Newsgroups
• Online shopping and order tracking
• Online banking
• Online office suites
• Domestic and international payment systems
• Shopping cart software
• Teleconferencing
• Electronic tickets

Government regulations

In the United States, some electronic commerce activities are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). These activities include the use of commercial e-mails, online advertising and consumer privacy. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 establishes national standards for direct marketing over e-mail. The Federal Trade Commission Act regulates all forms of advertising, including online advertising, and states that advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive.^[5] Using its authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices, the FTC has brought a number of cases to enforce the promises in corporate privacy statements, including promises about the security of consumers’ personal information.^[6] As result, any corporate privacy policy related to e-commerce activity may be subject to enforcement by the FTC.

The Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act of 2008, which came into law in 2008, amends the Controlled Substances Act to address online pharmacies.^[7]

Forms

Contemporary electronic commerce involves everything from ordering "digital" content for immediate online consumption, to ordering conventional goods and services, to "meta" services to facilitate other types of electronic commerce.

On the consumer level, electronic commerce is mostly conducted on the World Wide Web. An individual can go online to purchase anything from books or groceries, to expensive items like real estate. Another example would be online banking, i.e. online bill payments, buying stocks, transferring funds from one account to another, and initiating wire payment to another country. All of these activities can be done with a few strokes of the keyboard.

On the institutional level, big corporations and financial institutions use the internet to exchange financial data to facilitate domestic and international business. Data integrity and security are very hot and pressing issues for electronic commerce today.

See also

• Dot-com company
• E-government
• E-business
• Internet business
• Mobile commerce
• Paid content
• Social commerce
• Online shopping

Notes

1. ^ Kevin Kelly: We Are the Web Wired magazine, Issue 13.08, August 2005
2. ^ "eBay acquires PayPal". eBay. http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=84142. 
3. ^ "Press Release". Domain Name Wire. http://domainnamewire.com/2007/07/26/rh-donnelley-acquires-businesscom-for-345m/. 
4. ^ "The State of Retailing Online 2008". Forrester Research, Inc.. http://www.shop.org/c/journal_articles/view_article_content?groupId=1&articleId=702&version=1.0. 
5. ^ "Advertising and Marketing on the Internet: Rules of the Road". Federal Trade Commission. http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ruleroad.shtm. 
6. ^ "Enforcing Privacy Promises: Section 5 of the FTC Act". Federal Trade Commission. http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/privacyinitiatives/promises.html. 
7. ^ "H.R. 6353: Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act of 2008". Govtrack. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-6353&tab=summary. 

References

• Chaudhury, Abijit; Jean-Pierre Kuilboer (2002). e-Business and e-Commerce Infrastructure. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-247875-6. 
• Frieden, Jonathan D.; Roche, Sean Patrick (2006-12-19), "E-Commerce: Legal Issues of the Online Retailer in Virginia" (PDF), Richmond Journal of Law & Technology 13 (2), http://law.richmond.edu/jolt/v13i2/article5.pdf 
• Graham, Mark (2008), "Warped Geographies of Development: The Internet and Theories of Economic Development" (PDF), Geography Compass 2 (3): 771, doi:10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00093.x, http://geospace.co.uk/files/compass.pdf 
• Kessler, M. (2003). More shoppers proceed to checkout online. Retrieved January 13, 2004
• Nissanoff, Daniel (2006). FutureShop: How the New Auction Culture Will Revolutionize the Way We Buy, Sell and Get the Things We Really Want (Hardcover ed.). The Penguin Press. pp. 246 pages. ISBN 1-59420-077-7. 
• Seybold, Pat (2001). Customers.com. Crown Business Books (Random House). ISBN 0-609-60772-3. 
• Miller, Roger (2002). The Legal and E-Commerce Environment Today (Hardcover ed.). Thomson Learning. pp. 741 pages. ISBN 0-324-06188-9. 

External links

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of The Information Age

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of E-Commerce and E-Business

• U.S. Federal Trade Commission E-Commerce Fact Sheets
• US Small Business Guide to E-Commerce Laws and Regulations

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)