What is ECommerce

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Category: Ecommerce: Information

eCommerce (electronic commerce) or eBusiness (both terms being often used interchangeably) is the buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet.  It is currently one of the most important aspects of the Internet to emerge.  eCommerce is a term for any type of business, or commercial transaction, that involves the transfer of information across the Internet. It covers a range of different types of businesses, from consumer based retail sites, through auction or music sites, to business exchanges trading goods and services between corporations.

Although eCommerce has been in existence since approximately 1994 it took about four years for the major web browser software providers to be adopt the necessary security protocols to attract the general public.  As a result a substantial number of enterprises across the United States and Western Europe developed rudimentary sites between the years 1998 and 2000.

The collapse of the dot-com era in 2000 and 2001 saw a large number of "pure e-commerce" enterprises disappear, however many "bricks-and-mortar" or high street retailers identified valuable additional niche markets and began to add eCommerce capabilities to their own existing web
sites.