E-commerce

E-commerce: A Business Communication Initiative

E-commerce (Electronic Commerce) is a business-to-business (B2B) initiative aimed at communicating business transaction documents on a real-time or near real-time basis. E-commerce can be established between known trading partners, such as suppliers, customers and, increasingly, between a supplier’s supplier or a customer’s customer. This is the movement from simple B2B to electronic business-to-business (EB2B). Electronic Commerce is used as a platform for buying and selling of goods and services, or the transmitting of funds or data, over an electronic network, primarily the internet. Electronic Commerce transactions occur either as business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to-business. The terms e-commerce and e-business are often used interchangeably.

E-commerce can be also divided into the following categories:

What was the origin of electronic commerce..? The answer is EDI! Businesses started to use EDI in 1960s for exchanging of business documents in easier and more reliable way. It gave a push for the American National Standards Institute to develop ASC X12 as a common standard for companies in sharing documents via electronic network. The revolutionary steps in Electronic Commerce were made by Amazon and e-Bay. Today electronic commerce gives companies, clients, trading partners limitless possibilities in building electronic business relationships.

The rise of electronic business forces IT specialists to move further and widen infrastructure and support. Developing IT systems and regulatory mandates, designing new applications, creating e-activities, working on privacy and information protection issues are things thousands of people around the world are working on.

How e-commerce is controlled by the Government bodies? There exist agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council that regulate e-commerce activities like. The FTC monitors such activities like online marketing and advertising, customer privacy while PCI Council works on developing compliance standards for proper financial operations.

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