A complete guide on the advantages of ecommerce to business

What is E-commerce?
E-commerce (Electronic Commerce) refers to the use of platforms that facilitate the buying and selling of products online. This involves exchanging digital funds and data to conduct business transactions.

Although the most well-known example of e-commerce is online shopping, like Amazon and Alibaba, e-commerce can also refer to other types of online activities, like online auctions, online ticketing, and payment gateways.

There are six main models of ecommerce:

B2C (Business-to-Consumer)
B2B (Business-to-Business)
C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer)
C2B (Consumer-to-Business)
B2A (Business-to-Administration)
C2A (Consumer-to-Administration)
One of the top reasons why businesses gravitate towards e-commerce is because it provides a wider reach than a physical location. Thanks to this digital innovation, people can shop online from just about anywhere while businesses get to reduce operational costs and generate more revenue.

Electronic commerce or e-commerce is the process of buying and selling between businesses and consumers without a physical store, usually through an electronic medium. Often, this term refers to the internet as a marketplace but the term can also refer to retail activity through any electronic method. The technologies that support e-commerce include e-commerce or mobile commerce, the electronic transfer of funds, internet marketing, electronic data interchange, inventory management systems, and online transaction processing among others.

A Brief History of E-commerce
The e-commerce industry as we know it today didn’t happen overnight. It slowly developed over time:

1960: The inception of e-commerce dates back to the development of the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) in the 1960s. It was developed to replace mail and fax through digital transfer, eliminating the need for human intervention.

1972: Stanford students reportedly sold cannabis to MIT students through an Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) account. Arpanet is a packet switching network that is said to be one of the technical foundations of the internet.

1979: Michael Aldrich, an English inventor, introduced electronic shopping by connecting a modified TV to a transaction-processing computer through a telephone line.

1990: Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailiau built a hypertext project named WorldWideWeb. Soon after, it became a publicly available service on the internet.

1994: The first true e-commerce transaction can be traced back to when Dan Kohn, a 21-year old entrepreneur, ran a website called NetMarket and sold a Sting CD on August 11, 1994, through the website. The transaction, which involved the use of the credit card, was (for the first time ever) protected by encryption technology.

1995: Amazon originally launched as an e-commerce platform for books. Not long after, AuctionWeb (now known as eBay) launched, with online auctions as its primary focus.

1998: PayPal as a money transfer tool, making global e-commerce possible.

1999: Zappos and Victoria’s Secret entered the online shopping scene. Alibaba launched.

2001: Amazon launched their first mobile site.

2004: Additional security for online transactions was put in place with the formation of the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council.