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Ecommerce

Chapter 3

3.1 Introduction

This chapter discusses the topic of Electronic Commerce (Ecommerce). A brief history, definition, the main elements, influences, incentives and future prospects of the subject will be provided in the following sections.

3.2 A brief history of Ecommerce

Electronic commerce, being a new field, is still developing its theoretical and scientific foundations. Concepts such as email and file transfer data from the 1960s. In the early 1970s the extent of electronic applications was limited to large corporations, financial institutions, and a few daring small business (Turban, 2000). Since the 1960s and 1970s development such as video links and multimedia applications have evolved. Multimedia offers the potential for a number of innovative applications such as banking transactions, civil administration and commerce activities without using office space. Communication usage via email has rapidly grown, billions of email messages are now sent over the Internet every month, it has been recognised as the fasted growing medium for information exchange today (Black, 2000).
"The commercialisation of the Internet in the early 1990s and its rapid growth to millions of potential customers, the term electronic commerce was coined, and electronic commerce applications expanded rapidly" (Turban, 2000).

3.3 Defining Ecommerce

This section is divided into six parts that briefly discuss the scope of the topic of Ecommerce.

3.3.1 Introduction

Ecommerce is an emerging concept that can be described as business interaction using information and communication technology, which is useful to all business functions (finance, marketing and human resources etc) (Alter, 1999, McLeod & Schell, 2001, Turban, 2000).Ecommerce can support all aspects of trade in physical goods except the actual delivery. Digital goods, on the other hand, can even be delivered electronically (Clarke, 1998).

3.3.2 Key elements of Ecommerce

Mcleod & Schell (2001)...