An Introduction to ecommerce

Before going through the concepts of e-commerce, let us revise the meaning of commerce. Commerce is the all activities and procedures related with buying and selling of goods and services. It is a process of distribution of goods from a place where they are produced and found in plenty to a place where the goods are in short supply or scarce. It consists of all persons, organizations and institutions engaged in the distribution of goods and services and provides aids to trade. Aids to trade means the activities which are necessary for the smooth flow of goods from producer to consumer. These activities facilitates trade by removing various barriers in the buying and selling of goods.

The need for more timely information leads to the development of world's largest and most widely used networks, called the Internet. The Internet is an international collection of hardware and software from hundreds of thousands of private and public computer networks. It represents a global platform that permits digital information to be shared and distributed at very little cost to users.

The Internet provides a wide range of information interaction functions, including:

communication (i.e., sending e-mails, transmitting data, etc.),

 accessing information (i.e., searching databases, reading electronic books, etc.), and

supplying information (i.e., transferring files, graphics, etc.).

It is no wonder that people of commerce quickly saw opportunities in using  the Internet to conduct business. It was capacitated by businesses into universally accepted standards for  storing, retrieving, formatting, and displaying information in a networked  environment. This capacitated environment of the Internet is called the World  Wide Web (WWW) and permits businesses to get online and conduct a variety of  business activities.

Tim Berners-Lee (father of internet) of the European Laboratory for Particle  Physics was credited in 1990 with developing several protocols used in the initial  development of the WWW (Deithel, et al. 2001, p. 12). One example of the use of the WWW standardization capacity is the use of Web sites in conducting  business transactions. It is the capacity of the WWW that allows users of a computer over the Internet to locate and view multimedia documents such as text, graphics, animations, and videos that make up Web sites. As the use of the WWW matured during the 1990's, new terms emerged to more acturately differentiate the different types of business transactions that were taking place  over the Internet. One of these new terms was called "electronic commerce" hereafter referred to as "e-commerce."