e-commerce

e-commerce, maintaining relationships and conducting business transactions that include selling information, services, and goods by means of computer telecommunications networks.

Although in the vernacular e-commerce usually refers only to the trading of goods and services over the Internet, broader economic activity is included. E-commerce consists of business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce as well as internal organizational transactions that support those activities.

E-commerce originated in a standard for the exchange of business documents, such as orders or invoices, between suppliers and their business customers. Those origins date to the 1948–49 Berlin blockade and airlift with a system of ordering goods primarily via telex. Various industries elaborated upon that system in the ensuing decades before the first general standard was published in 1975. The resulting computer-to-computer electronic data interchange (EDI) standard is flexible enough to handle most simple electronic business transactions.

With the wide adoption of the Internet and the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1991 and of the first browser for accessing it in 1993, most e-commerce shifted to the Internet. More recently, with the global spread of smartphones and the accessibility of fast broadband connections to the Internet, much e-commerce moved to mobile devices, which also included tablets, laptops, and wearable products such as watches.

E-commerce has deeply affected everyday life and how business and governments operate. Commerce is conducted in electronic marketplaces (or marketspaces) and in the supply chains working on the Internet-Web. Consumer-oriented marketplaces include large e-malls (such as Amazon), consumer-to-consumer auction platforms (eBay, for example), multichannel retailers (such as L.L. Bean), and many millions of e-retailers. Massive business-to-business marketplaces have been created by Alibaba and other companies. The so-called sharing economy enables more efficient use of resources, as Airbnb does with online rentals of private residences. Almost instantaneous access to services is made available by on-demand platforms offering, for example, transportation (e.g., Uber), computation and storage resources furnished by cloud service providers, and medical and legal advice. Mass customization of goods sold online, such as garments and vehicles, became common. Electronic currencies (or cryptocurrencies) such as Bitcoin entered into play as the means of settlement. Semipermanent supply chains enable a hub company (such as Dell) to surround itself with suppliers that perform most production tasks and deliver other goods and services to the central firm.

Social network sites, such as Facebook, undergird a great variety of individual relationships and are the site of so-called social commerce, driven by the opinions and reviews shared by the participants as the electronic word-of-mouth. Online communities bind together participants who wish to share their knowledge, forge lasting relationships, or present themselves on a broad forum. Those communities became a potent source of cocreation of value by individuals who together and over long stretches of time, for example, produce open-source software or continually replenish an online encyclopaedia.

The Web is also an interactive medium of human communication that supplements, and often replaces, traditional media. The hypermedia nature of the Web, with the interlinking of multimedia content available on globally distributed sites, enables creation of new types of media products, often offered free of charge. Those new media include blogs, video aggregators (such as YouTube), social media (built with wiki technology, for example), and customized electronic newspapers. As with all media, this aspect of the Web leads to its use in marketing. Web advertising ranges from the display ads on Web sites to keyword ads shown to information seekers using search engines, such as Google. Mobile advertising is expanding apace because of the extensive use of smartphones. Deep knowledge of individuals is available to marketers because of the electronic collection of multifaceted profiles as people navigate the Web. In particular, location-based promotion of goods and services may be enabled in mobile commerce. The ability to derive revenue from ads drives various business models (for example, search engines) and produces incremental revenue for other businesses, as their customers access their Web sites or use mobile apps and can be exposed to the advertising messages.

Among innovations that have contributed to the growth of e-commerce are electronic directories and search engines for finding information on the Web; software agents, or bots, that act autonomously to locate goods and services; systems that recommend products to users based on their profile; and digital authentication services that vouch for identities over the Internet. Those intermediary services facilitate the sale of goods (actually delivering the goods in the case of information), the provision of services such as banking, ticket reservations, and stock market transactions, and the delivery of remote education and entertainment.

Businesses often deploy private Internet-type networks (intranets) for sharing information and collaborating within the company, usually insulated from the surrounding general Internet by computer-security systems known as firewalls. Collaborating businesses also frequently rely on extranets that allow encrypted communication over the Internet.

Security is a central concern in e-commerce. It includes authentication of the parties, authorization to access the given resources, confidentiality of the communication, and the assurance of message integrity. Many of those goals are accomplished with public key infrastructure, a system of specialized organizations and computerized means for providing electronic certificates that authenticate firms and, if desired, individuals; provide the encryption and decryption keys for communication; and furnish the protocols (algorithms) for secure communication. However, absolute security is not an attainable goal. Many spectacular data breaches are testimony to this, as well as to the neglect of this vital aspect of e-commerce.

Security underlies another important aspect of e-commerce, that of privacy. The massive assembly and use of individual profiles that reflect activity over many years and in many personal pursuits raises concerns. Such concerns are so far only partially addressed via legislation, self-regulation, and public pressure that can find instantaneous social amplification on the Internet.

Several important phenomena are associated with e-commerce. The role of geographic distance in forming business relationships is reduced. Barriers to entry into many types of businesses are lower, as it is relatively inexpensive to start a retail Web site or a community of producers. Some traditional business intermediaries are being replaced by their electronic equivalents or are being made entirely dispensable. (For instance, as airlines have published fare information and enabled ticketing directly over the Internet, storefront travel agencies have declined.) Prices of goods are generally lower on the Web—a reflection not merely of the lower costs of doing electronic business but also of the ease of comparison shopping in cyberspace. Consumers benefit greatly from the availability of products that are bought only rarely and would not be stocked by physical stores (the so-called longtail effect). Ever-new business models emerge and are pivoted (modified) as the marketplace reaction can be gauged rapidly. Since the incremental cost of producing a unit of content good (such as a software product) is close to zero, freemium business models are often employed in the content domain: the basic product is free, the premium versions are charged for. A new form of corporate cooperation known as a virtual company—which is actually a network of firms whose information systems are integrated over the Internet, each firm performing some of the processes needed to manufacture a product or deliver a service—has flourished. Broad publics are drawn in to contribute their labour, ideas, or funds in crowdsourcing initiatives.