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• Wesley Chai,
• Brian Holak, Site Editor
• Ben Cole, Executive Editor

Due east-commerce (electronic commerce) is the ownership and selling of goods and services, or the transmitting of funds or data, over an electronic network, primarily the internet. These business organization transactions occur either as concern-to-business organisation (B2B), business concern-to-consumer (B2C), consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to-business concern. The terms east-commerce and due east-business are often used interchangeably. The term due east-tail is besides sometimes used in reference to the transactional processes that make up online retail shopping.

In the final decade, widespread use of e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay has contributed to substantial growth in online retail. In 2007, e-commerce deemed for 5.1% of total retail sales; in 2019, eastward-commerce fabricated up 16.0%.

How does e-commerce piece of work?

Due east-commerce is powered by the net, where customers tin can admission an online store to browse through, and place orders for products or services via their own devices.

Every bit the order is placed, the customer'south web browser will communicate dorsum and forth with the server hosting the online shop website. Data pertaining to the order will then be relayed to a central computer known as the order manager -- and so forwarded to databases that manage inventory levels, a merchant system that manages payment data (using applications such as PayPal), and a bank estimator -- before circling dorsum to the order manager. This is to make sure that store inventory and customer funds are sufficient for the social club to be processed. After the order is validated, the order manager will notify the store's spider web server, which will then brandish a message notifying the customer that their order has been successfully processed. The society manager volition then send order data to the warehouse or fulfillment department, in order for the product or service to be successfully dispatched to the customer. At this point tangible and/or digital products may be shipped to a customer, or access to a service may be granted.

Platforms that host eastward-commerce transactions may include online marketplaces that sellers simply sign up for, such as Amazon.com; software equally a service (SaaS) tools that allow customers to 'rent' online store infrastructures; or open source tools for companies to use in-house development to manage.

Types of e-commerce

Business organization-to-business concern (B2B) e-commerce refers to the electronic substitution of products, services or information between businesses rather than between businesses and consumers. Examples include online directories and product and supply substitution websites that allow businesses to search for products, services and information and to initiate transactions through due east-procurement interfaces.

In 2017, Forrester Enquiry predicted that the B2B east-commerce market place volition summit $one.i trillion in the U.Due south. past 2021, accounting for 13% of all B2B sales in the nation.

Business-to-consumer (B2C) is the retail part of e-commerce on the internet. It is when businesses sell products, services or information directly to consumers. The term was popular during the dot-com nail of the belatedly 1990s, when online retailers and sellers of goods were a novelty.

Today, there are innumerable virtual stores and malls on the internet selling all types of consumer goods. The most recognized example of these sites is Amazon, which dominates the B2C market.

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) is a type of e-commerce in which consumers trade products, services and information with each other online. These transactions are more often than not conducted through a third party that provides an online platform on which the transactions are carried out.

Online auctions and classified advertisements are ii examples of C2C platforms, with eBay and Craigslist being two of the most pop of these platforms. Because eBay is a business, this form of e-commerce could as well be called C2B2C -- consumer-to-business organisation-to-consumer.

Consumer-to-business (C2B) is a type of east-commerce in which consumers make their products and services bachelor online for companies to bid on and purchase. This is the opposite of the traditional commerce model of B2C.

A popular example of a C2B platform is a market place that sells royalty-free photographs, images, media and blueprint elements, such every bit iStock. Another instance would be a chore lath.

Business-to-administration (B2A) refers to transactions conducted online between companies and public administration or government bodies. Many branches of government are dependent on e-services or products in i manner or another, especially when information technology comes to legal documents, registers, social security, fiscals and employment. Businesses tin supply these electronically. B2A services have grown considerably in contempo years equally investments have been fabricated in e-government capabilities.

Consumer-to-administration (C2A) refers to transactions conducted online between private consumers and public assistants or government bodies. The government rarely buys products or services from citizens, but individuals often employ electronic means in the following areas:

• Education. Disseminating information, distance learning/online lectures, etc.
• Social security. Distributing data, making payments, etc.
• Taxes. filing tax returns, making payments, etc.
• Health. Making appointments, providing information about illnesses, making health services payments, etc.

Mobile e-commerce (M-commerce) is a type of e-commerce on the rise that features online sales transactions fabricated using mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Thousand-commerce includes mobile shopping, mobile cyberbanking and mobile payments. Mobile chatbots besides provide e-commerce opportunities to businesses, allowing consumers to complete transactions with companies via vocalization or text conversations.

Advantages and disadvantages of due east-commerce

Benefits of e-commerce include its around-the-clock availability, the speed of access, the wide availability of goods and services for the consumer, piece of cake accessibility and international attain.

• Availability. Aside from outages or scheduled maintenance, e-commerce sites are available 24x7, allowing visitors to browse and shop at any time. Brick-and-mortar businesses tend to open for a fixed number of hours and may even close entirely on certain days.
• Speed of access. While shoppers in a physical store tin can be slowed by crowds, eastward-commerce sites run quickly, which is determined by compute and bandwidth considerations on both consumer device and e-commerce site. Product pages and shopping cart pages load in a few seconds or less. An e-commerce transaction can comprise a few clicks and take less than five minutes.
• Broad availability. Amazon's first slogan was "Earth's Biggest Bookstore." They could brand this merits considering they were an due east-commerce site and not a physical store that had to stock each book on its shelves. Due east-commerce enables brands to make a wide array of products bachelor, which are and then shipped from a warehouse after a buy is made. Customers will likely have more success finding what they desire.
• Easy accessibility. Customers shopping a physical store may accept a hard time determining which aisle a detail production is in. In e-commerce, visitors tin browse product category pages and utilize the site search characteristic the find the product immediately.
• International reach. Brick-and-mortar businesses sell to customers who physically visit their stores. With e-commerce, businesses tin can sell to any customer who can admission the web. E-commerce has the potential to extend a concern' customer base
• Lower cost. pure play e-commerce businesses avoid the toll associated with physical stores, such as hire, inventory and cashiers, although they may incur aircraft and warehouse costs.
• Personalization and product recommendations. E-commerce sites can track visitors' browse, search and purchase history. They can use this information to present useful and personalized product recommendations, and obtain valuable insights about target markets. Examples include the sections of Amazon product pages labeled "Ofttimes bought together" and "Customers who viewed this detail also viewed."

The perceived disadvantages of e-commerce include sometimes limited customer service, consumers non being able to come across or bear on a product prior to buy and the await time for production shipping.

• Limited customer service. If a customer has a question or issue in a physical store, he or she can meet a clerk, cashier or store manager for help. In an e-commerce store, customer service may be limited: The site may only provide support during certain hours of the day, or a phone call to a client service phone number may go on the customer on agree.
• Not being able to affect or see. While images on a webpage can provide a practiced sense about a product, it'due south different from experiencing it "directly," such equally playing music on speakers, assessing the picture quality of a television or trying on a shirt or apparel. E-commerce can pb consumers to receive products that differ from their expectations, which leads to returns. In some scenarios, the customer bears the burden for the cost of shipping the returned item to the retailer.
• Wait time. If a client sees an item that he or she likes in a store, the customer pays for it and so goes home with information technology. With east-commerce, at that place is a wait time for the product to be shipped to the customer's address. Although shipping windows are decreasing as next day delivery is now quite common, it's not instantaneous.
• Security. Skilled hackers can create authentic-looking websites that claim to sell well-known products. Instead, the site sends customers forfeit or faux versions of those products -- or, simply collects customers' credit card information. Legitimate east-commerce sites besides comport risk, especially when customers store their credit carte information with the retailer to make future purchases easier. If the retailer'southward site is hacked, hackers may come into the possession of customers' credit card data.

Due east-commerce applications

E-commerce is conducted using a variety of applications, such as E-mail, online catalogs and shopping carts, Electronic Information Interchange (EDI), the file transfer protocol, web services and mobile devices. This includes B2B activities and outreach, such as using email for unsolicited ads, usually viewed as spam, to consumers and other business concern prospects, besides as sending out eastward-newsletters to subscribers and SMS texts to mobile devices. More companies at present try to entice consumers directly online, using tools such as digital coupons, social media marketing and targeted advertisements.

The rise of due east-commerce has forced IT personnel to move beyond infrastructure pattern and maintenance to consider numerous customer-facing aspects, such as consumer data privacy and security. When developing IT systems and applications to adapt e-commerce activities, information governance-related regulatory compliance mandates, personally identifiable information privacy rules and data protection protocols must be considered.

East-commerce platforms and vendors

An eastward-commerce platform is a tool that is used to manage an e-commerce business. Due east-commerce platform options exist for clients ranging in size from modest businesses to large enterprises. These due east-commerce platforms include online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay, that simply require signing up for user accounts, and petty to no IT implementation. Some other e-commerce platform model is SaaS, where shop owners tin can subscribe to "rent" space in a cloud-hosted service that does not crave in-house evolution or on-premises infrastructure. Other east-commerce platforms may come in the form of open source platforms that require a hosting environment (cloud or on bounds), consummate manual implementation and maintenance.

A few examples of e-commerce marketplace platforms include:

• Amazon
• eBay
• Walmart Market
• Chewy
• Wayfair
• Newegg
• Alibaba
• Etsy
• Overstock
• Rakuten

Vendors offering e-commerce platform services for clients hosting their ain online store sites include:

• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• Magento
• Squarespace
• BigCommerce
• Ecwid
• Salesforce Commerce Deject (B2B and B2C options)
• Oracle SuiteCommerce

Government regulations for e-commerce

In the Usa, the Federal Merchandise Commission (FTC) and the Payment Carte Industry (PCI) Security Standards Quango are among the primary agencies that regulate e-commerce activities. The FTC monitors activities such as online advertizing, content marketing and customer privacy, while the PCI Security Standards Council develops standards and rules, including PCI Data Security Standard compliance, which outlines procedures for the proper treatment and storage of consumers' fiscal information.

To ensure the security, privacy and effectiveness of e-commerce, businesses should authenticate business concern transactions, control access to resources such every bit webpages for registered or selected users, encrypt communications, and implement security technologies, such as the Secure Sockets Layer and two-factor authentication.

History of e-commerce

The beginnings of e-commerce tin be traced to the 1960s, when businesses started using EDI to share business concern documents with other companies. In 1979, the American National Standards Found adult ASC X12 as a universal standard for businesses to share documents through electronic networks.

After the number of individual users sharing electronic documents with each other grew in the 1980s, the rise of eBay and Amazon in the 1990s revolutionized the eastward-commerce manufacture. Consumers can now purchase endless amounts of items online, from east-tailers, typical brick-and-mortar stores with e-commerce capabilities. Now, well-nigh all retailer companies are integrating online business practices into their business models.

Disruption to physical retail

Given the large rise in e-commerce in contempo years, many analysts, economists and consumers have debated whether the online B2C market will shortly make physical, brick-and-mortar stores obsolete. There is piddling question that online shopping is growing at a pregnant rate.

E-commerce continues to grow in 2020

Research from BigCommerce has found that Americans are about evenly split up on online versus offline, traditional retail shopping, with 51% of Americans preferring e-commerce and 49% preferring physical stores. Still, 67% of millennials prefer shopping online over offline. Co-ordinate to Forbes, xl% of millennials are likewise already using voice administration to brand purchases, with that number expected to surpass fifty% past 2020.

An instance of the affect eastward-commerce has had on physical retail is the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days in the United states. According to Rakuten Marketing data, in 2017, Cyber Monday, which features sales that are exclusively online, saw 68% college revenues than Black Friday, which is traditionally the biggest brick-and-mortar shopping solar day of the year.

According to data from ShopperTrak in 2017, physical store traffic on Black Friday declined by 1% year over year, and the two-day Thanksgiving-Black Friday period saw a 1.half-dozen% decline in traffic. Nearly xl% of sales on Black Fri came via a mobile device, up near 10% from the previous year, an indication that e-commerce is becoming m-commerce. Along with physical retail, eastward-commerce is transforming supply chain management practices among businesses, as distribution channels become increasingly digitized.

This was last updated in Dec 2020

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Source: https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/e-commerce

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