Electronic commerce, which is abbreviated popularly as e-commerce or eCommerce, is defined as the buying and selling of products or services over electronic media like the Internet or other Information Technology dependent networks. Sometimes e-commerce is also interchangeably used with the terminology e-business.
The amount of transactions and the volume of trade conducted via electronic commerce has grown exponentially with widespread adoption of the Internet and Internet based technologies. The use electronic commerce is done in applications related to electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems and automated data collection systems. Traditional electronic commerce used the World Wide Web or the internet and now is transcending the utilization of mobile platforms to optimize the application of ubiquitous computing. Very recently an emergent trend is foreseen that the Spoken Web will be the future media for electronic commerce.
The transaction wise representation of the various models of e-commerce or e-business is denoted by the following diagram.
The most singular uniform way the various e-business models can be viewed under is as follows:
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