e-commerce, commerce conducted over the Internet Internet, the, international computer network linking together thousands of individual networks at military and government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, industrial and financial corporations of all sizes, and commercial enterprises
..... Click the link for more information. , most often via the World Wide Web World Wide Web (WWW or W3), collection of globally distributed text and multimedia documents and files and other network services linked in such a way as to create an immense electronic library from which information can be retrieved quickly by intuitive searches.
..... Click the link for more information. . E-commerce can apply to purchases made through the Web or to business-to-business activities such as inventory transfers. A customer can order items from a vendor's Web site, paying with a credit card credit card, device used to obtain consumer credit at the time of purchasing an article or service. Credit cards may be issued by a business, such as a department store or an oil company, to make it easier for consumers to buy their products.
..... Click the link for more information. (the customer enters account information via the computer) or with a previously established "cybercash" account. The transaction information is transmitted (usually by modem fax modem enables a computer to send and receive transmissions to and from a fax machine (see facsimile ) or another fax modem.

Modems were first used with teletype machines to send telegrams and cablegrams.
..... Click the link for more information. ) to a financial institution for payment clearance and to the vendor for order fulfillment. Personal and account information is kept confidential through the use of "secured transactions" that use encryption technology (see data encryption data encryption, the process of scrambling stored or transmitted information so that it is unintelligible until it is unscrambled by the intended recipient. Historically, data encryption has been used primarily to protect diplomatic and military secrets from foreign
..... Click the link for more information. ).

In an effort to further the development of e-commerce, the federal Electronic Signatures Act (2000) established uniform national standards for determining the circumstances under which contracts and notifications in electronic form are legally valid. Legal standards were also specified regarding the use of an electronic signature ("an electronic sound, symbol, or process, attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record"), but the law did not specify technological standards for implementing the act. The act gave electronic signatures a legal standing similar to that of paper signatures, allowing contracts and other agreements, such as those establishing a loan or brokerage account, to be signed on line.

Once consumers' worries eased about on-line credit card purchases, e-commerce grew rapidly in the late 1990s. In 1998 on-line retail ("e-tail") sales were $7.2 billion, double the amount in 1997. On-line retail ordering represented 15% of nonstore sales (which included catalogs, television sales, and direct sales) in 1998, but this constituted only 1% of total retail revenues that year. Books are the most popular on-line product order—with over half of Web shoppers ordering books (one on-line bookseller, Amazon.com, which started in 1995, had revenues of $610 million in 1998)—followed by software, audio compact discs compact disc (CD), a small plastic disc used for the storage of digital data. As originally developed for audio systems, the sound signal is sampled at a rate of 44,100 times a second, then each sample is measured and digitally encoded on the 4 3-4 in (12 cm) disc as
..... Click the link for more information. , and personal computers personal computer (PC), small but powerful computer primarily used in an office or home without the need to be connected to a larger computer. PCs evolved after the development of the microprocessor made possible the hobby-computer movement of the late 1970s, when
..... Click the link for more information. . Other on-line commerce includes trading of stocks stock, in finance, instrument certifying to shares in the ownership of a corporation. Bonds are similar evidences of shares in a loan to a corporation. Stock yields no dividends until claims of bondholders have been met.
..... Click the link for more information. , purchases of airline tickets and groceries, and participation in auctions.

e-commerce

in full electronic commerce

business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce conducted by way of the Internet or other electronic networks. E-commerce originated in a standard for the exchange of documents during the 1948–49 Berlin blockade and airlift. Various industries elaborated upon the system until the first general standard was published in 1975. The electronic data interchange (EDI) standard is unambiguous, independent of any particular machine, and flexible enough to handle most simple electronic transactions. In addition to standard forms for business-to-business transactions, e-commerce encompasses much wider activity—for example, the deployment of secure private networks (intranets) for sharing information within a company, as well as selective extensions of a company's intranet to collaborating business networks (extranets). A new form of cooperation known as a virtual company, actually a network of firms, each performing some of the processes needed to manufacture a product or deliver a service, has flourished.

(Electronic-COMMERCE) Doing business online, typically via the Web. It is also called "e-business," "e-tailing" and "I-commerce." Although in most cases e-commerce and e-business are synonymous, e-commerce implies that goods and services can be purchased online, whereas e-business might be used as more of an umbrella term for a total presence on the Web, which would naturally include the e-commerce (shopping) component.

E-commerce may also refer to electronic data interchange (EDI), in which one company's computer queries and transmits purchase orders to another company's computer. See m-commerce, microcommerce and clicks and mortar.

The First E-Commerce?
In 1886, a telegraph operator was able to obtain a shipment of watches that was refused by the local jeweler. Using the telegraph, he sold all the watches to fellow operators and railroad employees. Within a few months, he made enough money to quit his job and start his own store. The young man's name was Richard Sears. His company later became Sears, Roebuck.

e-commerce - electronic commerce

e-commerce playV2('en/US/df/dfddjnddshsjshd5sod5dnh5h5');playV2('en/UK/df/dfddjnddshsjshd5sod5dnh5h5')

e-commerce

e-commerce