Overview

The advent of e-commerce at the turn of this century brought about a revolution in business processes and redefined our notion of a customer. The most important technology and business innovations that enabled this revolution are the extension of the Internet to the Web and the electronic transaction of business known as e-commerce. With this combination of technology and business, viewing of information, communication, advertising, marketing, and business transactions can be initiated at any time of the day and from anywhere in the world by a consumer with access to the Web. Not only can business be transacted rapidly and without the constraint of physical borders, but also Web-based e-commerce is considered to be significantly more economical and efficient than traditional business processes.

In order to better understand the implications of global e-commerce, it is important to gain a solid foundation in the basic concepts. As companies introduced more applications to the Web, it became apparent that describing and presenting their products and services was the most rudimentary form of Web application. The next logical progression was the ability to accept and process business transactions (what quickly became known as e-commerce). In the simplest terms, e-commerce is the ability to use the Web as a marketing channel and as a sales interface to initiate and transact business between providers and consumers. The most common e-commerce models are business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and consumer-to-business-to-business (C2B2B), or what is often described as a portal. B2C applications are...