E-Commerce as a component of E-Business

Welcome to my second blog about IT use in organizations. In my first blog I explained the importance of Customer Relationship Management. In this blog I will explain the main idea of E-Commerce and the different types of this emerging notion.

E-Commerce is a relatively new conception to many people. I have already heard about E-Commerce before and I knew that it has something to do with E-Business, but that is about it. E-Commerce is simply explained as doing business on the internet. So there actually are two notions which look like each other and has to do with each other. “E-Business” and “E-Commerce”. E-Commerce is a component of E-Business. E-Commerce is all about online transactions, which means that it is all about buying and selling goods and services over the internet. E-Business is much broader and is also about online transactions, but refers more to all internet based interactions with suppliers, customers and other organizations.

There are different types of E-Commerce in today’s society which are abbreviated as: B2B, B2C and C2C. These abbreviations are explained below.
B2B = Business 2 Business
B2C = Business 2 Consumers
C2C = Consumers 2 Consumers

B2B means nothing more than trading between 2 companies/organizations. B2C is about trading from a company to a customer and C2C means trading between 2 customers. For instance eBay.com is a good example of C2C, a virtual place where people “come together” to offer products to others who are buying those products.

Like mentioned above, for too many people the notion “E-Commerce” is unknown, but a lot of people are trading in products on the internet on websites as Marktplaats and eBay. So many people have to deal with E-Commerce, but the only haven’t heard about the notion itself. Regarding E-Commerce and the future there are emerging some very interesting developments. “Social Commerce” is one of those developments which is relatively unknown for now, but which is probably getting more and more popular in the future. Social Commerce is that a lot of users become traders y by making use of their own websites to sell products and services. The current technology is making it easier and cheaper.
The last upcoming development which I am going to discuss is “Live Shopping”. This is getting very popular in Germany and it is quite easy. A product which is very popular among potential buyers is for sale during one day with a permanent discount from 50 percent for instance. The discount from 50 percent is so attractive that “everybody” wants to buy that product. And the organizations are still making good money, despite of the huge discount and a few weeks later they will come with another attractive product which makes the other products old-fashioned and perhaps even redundant. In this way the organizations ensure that the people want to buy this new product, because people are sensitive for trends and modernity.

I hope this blog about E-Commerce was interesting and I hope you will keep reading my other blogs!