Electronic Commerce is one of the most important aspects of the internet to emerge. It allows people to exchange goods and services immediately and with no barriers of time or distance. Any time of the day or night, you can go online and buy almost anything you want. The hottest areas of e-commerce, in terms of tangible goods sold via the Internet and other electronic means are computer products, consumer products, books and magazines, and music and entertainment products. Like the Internet, electronic commerce has in fact been around for a long time. Large corporations have been conducting electronic transactions via Electronic Data Interchange (or EDI) for years. The problem is that EDI is run on proprietary networks, and uses proprietary software. It is too expensive to be used by smaller businesses.

The Internet, on the other hand, is an open network. The software that makes the Internet work is in the public domain. Anyone can install it for free. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who sell you Internet access are often owned by large companies, which also own the telecommunications networks over which the Internet runs, but they don't own the Internet itself. No one does.

This means that accessing and using the Internet is relatively inexpensive. It makes it possible for a one-person business in Morrisville, say, to use technology that once would only have been available to a multinational company. It means that our business, courtesy of the Internet, can operate in the global environment, participating in global networks and markets.