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Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction\'s lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.
A small percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce involves the transportation of physical items in some way. Online retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is sometimes known as e-tail. Almost all big retailers have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web.
Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as Business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market).
Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of the business transactions.
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The meaning of electronic commerce has changed over the last 30 years. Originally, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of electronic commerce. From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.
Perhaps it is introduced from the Telelphone Exchange Office.The earliest example of many-to-many electronic commerce in physical goods was the Boston Computer Exchange, a marketplace for used computers launched in 1982. The first online information marketplace, including online consulting, was likely the American Information Exchange, another pre-Internet online system introduced in 1991.
When the Web first became well-known among the general public in 1994, many journalists and pundits forecast that e-commerce would soon become a major economic sector. However, it took about four years for security protocols (like HTTPS) to become sufficiently developed and widely deployed. Subsequently, between 1998 and 2000, a substantial number of businesses in the United States and Western Europe developed rudimentary web sites.
In the dot com era, electronic commerce came to include activities more precisely termed "Web commerce" -- the purchase of goods and services over the World Wide Web, usually with secure connections with e-shopping carts and with electronic payment services such as credit card payment authorizations.
Although a large number of "pure" electronic commerce companies disappeared during the dot-com collapse in 2000 and 2001, many "brick-and-mortar" retailers recognized that such companies had identified valuable niche markets and began to add e-commerce capabilities to their Web sites. For example, after the collapse of online grocer Webvan, two traditional supermarket chains, Albertsons and Safeway, both started e-commerce subsidiaries through which consumers could order groceries online.
The emergence of electronic commerce also significantly lowered barriers to entry in the selling of many types of goods; many small home-based proprietors are able to use the internet to sell goods. Often, small sellers use online auction sites such as eBay, or sell via large corporate websites like Amazon.com, in order to take advantage of the exposure and setup convenience of such sites.
$259 billion of online sales including travel are expected in 2007 in USA, an 18% increase from the previous year, as forecasted by the State of Retailing Online 2007 report from the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Shop.org.Online sales spike 19 percent. CNN (May 14 2007).
Currently there are 67 Fortune 1000 companies that have ecommerce revenues greater than $10 million. The 5 largest Internet retailers are Amazon, Staples, Office Depot, Dell, and Hewlett Packard. This indicates that the top categories of products sold on the Internet are books, music, office supplies, computers, and other consumer electronics. A list of Fortune 1000 companies ranked by ecommerce revenues can be found on AListNet. Fortune 1000 Companies Ranked by eCommerce Revenues. AListNet (Sep 1 2007).
Some common applications related to electronic commerce are:
In the United States, some electronic commerce activities are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). These activities include the use of commercial e-mails, online advertising and consumer privacy. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 establishes national standards for direct marketing over e-mail. The Federal Trade Commission Act regulates all forms of advertising, including online advertising, and states that advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive.Advertising and Marketing on the Internet: Rules of the Road. Federal Trade Commission. Using its authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices, the FTC has brought a number of cases to enforce the promises in corporate privacy statements, including promises about the security of consumers’ personal information.Enforcing Privacy Promises: Section 5 of the FTC Act. Federal Trade Commission. As result, any corporate privacy policy related to e-commerce activity may be subject to enforcement by the FTC.
Contemporary electronic commerce involves everything from ordering "digital" content for immediate online consumption, to ordering conventional goods and services, to "meta" services to facilitate other types of electonric commerce.
On the consumer level, electronic commerce is mostly conducted on the World Wide Web. An individual can go online to purchase anything from books, grocery to expensive items like real estate. Another example will be online banking like online bill payments, buying stocks, transferring funds from one account to another, and initiating wire payment to another country. All these activities can be done with a few keystrokes on the keyboard.
On the institutional level, big corporations and financial institutions use the internet to exchange financial data to facilitate domestic and international business. Data integrity and security are very hot and pressing issues for electronic commerce these days.
From the inception of the Internet until the late 1990s, the Internet was free of regulation by government in the United States at all levels, and also free of any specially targeted tax levies, duties, imposts, or license fees. By 1996, however, that began to change, as several U.S. states and municipalities began to see Internet services as a potential source of tax revenue.
The 1998 Internet Tax Freedom Act halted the expansion of direct taxation of the Internet, grandfathering existing taxes in ten US states.Internet Tax Freedom Act, 47 U.S.C. § 151 (1998). In the United States alone, some 30,000 taxing jurisdictions could otherwise have laid claim to taxes on a piece of the Internet.Internet Taxation [1] published by Duke University The law, however, did not affect sales taxes applied to online purchases. These continue to be taxed at varying rates depending on the jurisdiction, in the same way that phone and mail orders are taxed.
The enactment of this legislation has coincided with the beginning of a period of spectacular Internet growth. Its proponents argue that the benefits of knowledge, trade, and communications that the Internet is bringing to more people in more ways than ever before are worth the tax revenue losses, if any, and that the economic and productivity growth attributable to the Internet may well have contributed more revenues to various governments than would otherwise have been received. Opponents, on the other hand, have argued that the Internet would continue to prosper even if taxed, and that the current federal ban on Internet-specific levies denies government at all levels a much-needed source of revenue.
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