E-Commerce

e-commerce is just the process of buying and selling produce by electronic means such as by mobile applications and the Internet. E commerce refers to both online retail as well as electronic transactions. E commerce has hugely increased in popularity over the last decades, and in ways, it's replacing traditional brick and mortar stores.

E commerce enables you to buy and sell products on a global scale, twenty-four hours a day without incurring the same overheads as you would with running a brick and mortar store.

While most people think of e commerce as business to consumer (B2C), there are many other types of e commerce. These include online auction sites, internet banking, online ticketing and reservations, and business to business (B2B) transactions. Recently, the growth of e commerce has expanded to sales using mobile devices, which is commonly known as ‘m-commerce' and is simply a subset of e commerce.

Electronic commerce or e-commerce (sometimes written as eCommerce) is a business model that lets firms and individuals conduct business over electronic networks, most notably: the Internet. Electronic commerce operates in all four of the following major market segments:

• Business to business
• Business to consumer
• Consumer to consumer
• Consumer to business

• The Advantages and Disadvantages of Electronic Commerce

  E-commerce offers consumers the following advantages:
  • Convenience. E-commerce can occur 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
  • Increased selection. Many stores offer a wider array of products online than they carry in their brick-and-mortar counterparts. And many stores that solely exist online may offer consumers exclusive inventory that's unavailable elsewhere.
  E-commerce carries the following disadvantages:
  • Limited customer service. If you’re shopping online for a computer, you cannot simply ask an employee to demonstrate a particular model's features in person. And although some websites let you chat online with a staff member, this is not a typical practice.
  • Lack of instant gratification. When you buy an item online, you must wait for it to be shipped to your home or office. However, retailers like Amazon make the waiting game a little bit less painful, by offering same-day delivery, as a premium option for select products.
  • Inability to touch products. Online images don’t necessarily convey the whole story about an item, and so e-commerce purchases can be dissatisfying when the products received don't match consumer expectations. Case in point: an item of clothing may be made from shoddier fabric than its online image indicates.