E-Commerce

e-commerce

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in full electronic commerce

maintaining business relationships and selling information, services, and commodities by means of computer telecommunications networks.

Although in the vernacular e-commerce usually refers only to the trading of goods and services over the Internet, broader economic activity is included. E-commerce consists of business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce as well as internal organizational transactions that support these activities.

E-commerce originated in a standard for the exchange of business documents, such as orders or invoices, between suppliers and their business customers. This standard had its inception in the 1948-49 Berlin blockade and airlift. The U.S. Army quickly discovered that the normal manner of transacting business--accompanied by paper orders--could not keep up with the necessary flow of goods into Berlin. To break the paper bottleneck, Edward A. Guilbert, a logistics officer in the army, set up a system of ordering via telex, radio-teletype, and telephone. Various industries elaborated upon this system in the ensuing decades before the first general standard was published in 1975. The resulting national electronic data interchange (EDI) standard is unambiguous, independent of any particular machine, and flexible enough to handle most simple electronic transactions.

With the introduction of the first graphical "browser" software for accessing the World Wide Web in 1993, and the ensuing scramble for companies and individuals to get "online," most e-commerce shifted to the Internet. In some fields new Internet retailers such as the bookseller Amazon.com grew up, seemingly overnight, to challenge the dominance of traditional retailers. Some established companies embraced the electronic commerce model as well. The Intel Corporation, for instance, sold almost half of its $30 billion in annual computer-chip sales directly through its Web site in 1999 and planned to move most of its sales to the Web in succeeding years.

As important as standard forms are for business-to-business transactions, e-commerce encompasses much wider activity. For example, secure electronic transfer of sensitive information (such as credit card numbers and electronic funds transfer [EFT] orders) is essential to the continued growth of e-commerce. In addition to encrypting Web purchase forms, many individuals also routinely encrypt their e-mail.

Among other innovations that have contributed to the growth of e-commerce are electronic directories and search engines for finding information on the Web; software agents,