Ecommerce (or e-commerce) is the art and science of selling products and/or services over the Internet.
When I first created this definition of ecommerce in 2003, I wrote:
"While some prefer the narrower ecommerce definition of conducting financial transactions through electronic means, I prefer the broader ecommerce definition because there are still a lot of people trying to sell things over the 'Net who aren't actually conducting financial transactions electronically."
Those days are gone. Now you would be hard pressed to find a website that asked people to print an online form, complete it and mail it in with their payment to buy a product.
Many other methods of electronic payment have been invented such as PayPal and HyperWallet and merchant accounts, allowing those involved in ecommerce to accept credit card payments electronically, have become more widespread as ecommerce has evolved. So today I feel the narrower ecommerce definition that specifies conducting financial transactions through electronic means is apt.
However, the point is moot to the Canadian government, which uses
"...the OECD’s (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) narrow definition of e-commerce whereby an Internet transaction "is the sale or purchase of goods or services, whether between businesses, households, individuals, governments, and other public or private organizations, conducted over the Internet". The goods or services are ordered over the Internet, but the payment and the ultimate delivery of the good or service may be conducted on or off-line. This 'narrow' definition excludes orders received or placed by telephone, facsimile or other computer-mediated networks such as EDI" (Internet shopping in Canada: An examination of data, trends and patterns, Lawrence McKeown, Statistics Canada and Josie Brocca, Industry Canada, December 2009).
An adjacent note states that an OECD Expert Working Group is proposing to update this ecommerce definition because of the increasing difficulty of businesses to "distinguish between sales carried out through different types of computer-mediated applications", a sensible idea in my opinion.
For anyone who wants to know about the state of ecommerce in Canada, the paper cited above is a must-read. It uses data from Statistics Canada's Internet use surveys to examine Canadian online shopping from 2001 to 2007.
The OECD also adheres to what I feel is a useful distinction between ebusiness and ecommerce; ecommerce has commercial transactions at its core while ebusiness, the broader term, encompasses "all other forms of business process" (Bill Pattinson, E-commerce, Toward an International Definition and Internationally Comparable Statistical Indicators, Information, Computer and Communications Policy Division, OECD, 1997).
In sum, e-commerce may be conducted B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer). But simply put, any website that attempts to sell something is involved in ecommerce.
