Defining E-commerce

Hello again from cyberspace!


With this blog's new focus on electronic commerce, it will be beneficial what e-commerce actually is, along with the how the Internet can affect the relationships within a business.


While the Internet is typically seen as central to e-commerce, it is defined in these posts as the process of buying, selling, transferring, or exchanging products, services, and information via computer networks. These networks can include the Internet, connecting the business to other entities, or within a company's own intranet. By this definition, even adding an internal system for a company that functions by transferring data will be considered e-commerce. The benefit of this system may not be immediately apparent to the customer, but (hopefully) having the system in place will either lower costs or allow the company to compete in different areas.


Any of these sharing transactions can be a combination of purely or partially electronic, or be transacting with real or digital goods. For example, a company could be selling electronic goods in the physical space, like Gamestop which specializes in selling video games and other software. The transaction could also begin on the Internet, but involve the movement of physical goods, an arena in which Amazon excels. Amazon has also entered into purely electronic transactions by way of their cloud based services. In AWS, Amazon is leasing server space for companies to host their services on Amazon computers. The cloud has gotten a lot of press lately, and Amazon is helping to bring it to the common user with their web services.


I'm sure that none of these definitions are ground-breaking, but it is good to set the central definitions for the next series of blogs.