What is the shortest explanation of ecommerce?

How would you answer most shortly a meaningfull defenition of the term ecommerce to describe what it means?

Investment Dictionary: Electronic Commerce - eCommerce

A type of business model, or segment of a larger business model, that enables a firm or individual to conduct business over an electronic network, typically the internet. Electronic commerce operates in all four of the major market segments: business to business, business to consumer, consumer to consumer and consumer to business.

Financial & Investment Dictionary: Electronic Commerce

Buying and selling on the Internet. Also called e-commerce, it has three subcategories: business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and consumer-to-consumer (C2C).


Marketing Dictionary: e-commerce

Business transactions conducted via electronic means; most often referring to Internet-based relationships between customers and vendors, but also including CD-ROM catalogs; also called internet marketing. The Internet, direct marketing's newest channel, has provided an unprecedented opportunity on a global basis for businesses to interact with, reach out to, and be accessible by their customers without limitations with respect to physical location or time zone.

Accounting Dictionary: Electronic Commerce (EC)

The buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet, especially the World Wide Web. In practice, this term and a new term, "e-business," are often used interchangeably. For on-line retail selling, the term e-tailing is sometimes used. It is also called e-commerce for short, on-line commerce, Internet commerce, e-business, or Cyberspace commerce.

Business Encyclopedia: Electronic Commerce

"No single force embodies our electronic transformation more than the evolving medium known as the Internet. Internet technology is having a profound effect on the global trade in services," according to a White House paper in 1997. Electronic commerce is estimated to have been in the range of $63 billion in 1999 and is expected to soar to $1,444 trillion by 2003 (For rester Research, 1999). Electronic commerce is a broad term describing business activities with as sociated technical data that are conducted electronically.

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: e-commerce

business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce conducted by way of the Internet or other electronic networks. E-commerce originated in a standard for the exchange of documents during the 1948 鈥?49 Berlin blockade and airlift. Various industries elaborated upon the system until the first general standard was published in 1975. The electronic data interchange (EDI) standard is unambiguous, independent of any particular machine, and flexible enough to handle most simple electronic transactions.

Columbia Encyclopedia: e-commerce,
commerce conducted over the Internet, most often via the World Wide Web. E-commerce can apply to purchases made through the Web or to business-to-business activities such as inventory transfers. A customer can order items from a vendor's Web site, paying with a credit card (the customer enters account information via the computer) or with a previously established 鈥渃ybercash鈥?account. The transaction information is transmitted (usually by modem) to a financial institution for payment clearance and to the vendor for order fulfillment. Personal and account information is kept confidential through the use of 鈥渟ecured transactions鈥?that use encryption technology

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