E-commerce

Since the inception of World Wide Web (WWW) business has been attempting to harness it as new business platform. E-commerce is the automation of commercial transactions using computer and communication networks such as Internet or the web. The term commercial here refers to those activities that create transactions between business firms and individuals. These transactions may involve the exchange of money, goods, and services. Here are some examples of e-commerce transactions

• Withdrawing money at an ATM
• Booking a railway ticket on the web
• Buying a book on Amazon
  

E-commerce transactions can take place between business to business called B2B or can also occur between business and consumer called B2C.

E-commerce intends to exploit the advantage of economies in a single-point keying to reduce errors and round-about time, a high degree of customizability of products and services to meet end-user needs and customer interactions at very low marginal cost. One of the first ever e-commerce system Minitel was introduced in France in 1970’s. Now with the advancement in web technologies, the scope of e-commerce is widened and now it is called E-Business. Unlike e-e-commerce which focused on merely conducting transactions on the net, e-business takes much broader view of the web and transforms many more facets of the business onto web platform