Ecommerce Information

Ecommerce in its most basic form is any means of transacting business over the internet. Of course we know this can now extend to your web enabled cell phone and perhaps other appliances as well.

Most people associate ecommerce with a shopping cart where they purchase goods, pay for them and arrange delivery. This is the most visible form but not the only one. You could engage in a simple version if you provide for a customer to email you to order a product without directly paying at the time of purchase. You may arrange to call them to obtain payment information or they may have credit with an open account for which you bill them on a regular basis.  It is still ecommerce if they communicate their order for your products or services via the internet.

Charities often use ecommerce to collect donations without actually selling anything. This counts as ecommerce as well.

While any one doing business online is presumed to be engaging in "ecommerce", for our purposes we limit the definition to those web sites where an actual transaction of money for goods and services can take place 24 hours a day with no real time action needed by the site owner at the time of the transaction. This would be your typical shopping cart installaton.

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