With the astounding growth of the Internet, many companies are finding new and moving ways to expand upon their business opportunities. There are very few triumphant companies that do not use computers in their everyday business actions, which also mean there are few companies that do not use e-commerce. Today there are thousands of companies participating in e-commerce and the trend shows no signs of slowing. But what exactly is e-commerce? To a lot of students and people, e-commerce means online shopping, like buying Christmas presents from an online vendor. To describe e-commerce best would be to say, it is an exchange of business information between two or more organizations. Any purchase made via the Internet would be an example for this. E-commerce exceptional growth in the today's society and business is directly related to its efficient advantages it has over traditional means of commerce. .
Electronic commerce or e-commerce has developed quickly in the last five years. "Most people think e-commerce is just about buying and selling things over the Internet." (Wareham, 2000) E-commerce is a broad term describing the electronic exchange of business data between two or more organizations' computers. E-commerce includes as previously mentioned, buying and selling any item over the Internet, electronic funds transfers, online banking, and any other digitally conducted business. The Internet brings together goods, services, and information rather than having to gather it from multiple sources of media. A specific goal of Ecommerce is getting businesses, communities and government all working on the same level.
History of E-commerce.
Electronic commerce was built on a foundation that was started more than 125 years ago with Western Union's money transfer as an example of telegraph technology. (Hof, R 2000) In the early 1900's the advent of credit cards as a payment system revolutionized the process of computerized commerce functions.
