* 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 extraordinary 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 known
as e-tail. 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). E-commerce or electronic commerce is generally
considered to be the sales aspect of e-business.

*E-commerce is the online transaction of business, featuring linked computer systems of the vendor, host, and buyer. Electronic transactions involve the transfer of ownership or rights to use a good or service. Most people are familiar with business-to-consumer electronic business (B2C).

Early development

The meaning of "electronic commerce" has changed over teh 30 years. Originally, "electronic commerce" meant the facilitation of commercail 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 electronics. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of e-commerce. From the 1990s onwards, e-commerce would additionally include
enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

Web development

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, e-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.