Introduction to electronic commerce and e-business

One of the major buzz words of the last decade of the 20 ^th century was “e-commerce”. With the rise of mega online stores like Amazon.com , online auctions such as ebay , credit cards, plastic money and payment gateways such as paypal the consumerism of the masses was taken to a whole different playing field. For the first time in history, people could buy stuff form the comfort of their homes or while having lunch in their work places. According to Turban et al. (201)

“Electronic commerce (EC) is the process of buying, selling, transferring, or exchanging products, services, and/or information via computer networks, mostly the Internet and intranets”

This roughly means that e-commerce concentrates on getting the orders and the payments from the customers into a business. All other operations we conducted as usual in the old fashioned way. You can get a better understanding about e-commerce from (External Link) .

However, the 21st century and the rapid advancements in technology have given rise to a completely new paradigm which is known as e-business. Wikipedia defines it as:

“…the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) in support of all the activities of business .” (Electronic business)

With the rise of e-business, a complete business comprising of all the intricate operations can be taken online which results in the rise of virtual companies with virtual employees contributing from every corner of the globe. E-business has made geography insignificant when it comes to competing in the global market. To get a better understanding of e-business see (External Link)

References

Electronic business. (n.d.). Retrieved 01 06, 2011, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_business

Turban, E., King, D., Lee, J., Liang, T. P.,&Turban, D. (2010). Electronic Commerce 2010 A Managerial Perspective. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.