E Commerce working made easy

Posted by: claynekeegan on January 27, 2012 Under: Ecommerce |

Explaining how e commerce works is rather simple. E commerce is nothing but the exchange of goods and / or services electronically.

If you have bought something from eBay, Amazon.com or any online store, then you have participated in e commerce. If you’ve ever downloaded music from a site like Napster or iTunes, that’s e commerce, too. First, lets discuss the different types of e commerce to help you understand it better.

B2B: B2B or business-to-business was the first form of e commerce that was brought into existence. The 1960s marked the beginning of electronic transfer and sharing of files and information by banks and other businesses. However, there wasn’t one standard way of conducting this business, as a result of which many businesses could not successfully transfer between each other. This limited the sharing of files and information between businesses. B2B e commerce really got going in the 80s with the application of reliable standardization that was universally accepted facilitating easy exchange of files.

C2C: Consumer-to-consumer or C2C is one of the well known forms of e commerce today. If you’ve ever purchased something online from another person, rather than a business, either through an ad posting on a electronic bulletin board or an online auction, you’ve participated in consumer-to-consumer e commerce. Online auctions are the most popular manifestation of consumer-to-consumer e commerce, eBay, the gigantic site which allows users to put up their goods and sell them to the highest bidder is a well known example of the same.

P2P: P2P or peer-to-peer e commerce began with Napster, which allowed users to share files without paying for it. Several instances of similar websites and file-sharing programs and systems can be found online.

B2C: Business-to-consumer forms a major portion of overall e commerce transactions and hence it must be necessarily mentioned while explaining the working of e commerce. Thus e commerce includes any purchase made at an online store or website, it can be a download of something electronic or any item that has to be shipped to the buyer. Working of e commerce can be easily explained if you keep in mind the following things.

The definition of e commerce includes the online exchange of at least one of the following: Information, Money, Goods / Services. Simple concepts can be used to explain how e commerce works in your favor. For instance, if you wish to purchase a book, there are several online bookstores which you can use to compare the prices of that book and find the lowest one. You can check the cost of shipping the book, and their shipping times, and determine which store can get it to you the quickest, for the lowest price.

All of this can be achieved without having to stand in line, fight crowds, or spend money for transportation or gas. The fact that you can compare and shop for small as well as large items is just one of the advantages that e commerce offers you. Though we can explain how e commerce works in your favor, once you’ve purchased an item this way, it’s easy to see the advantages yourself.