E-Commerce Concept
The term E-Commerce, designates the purchase and sale of products or services when the buyers use electronic systems (namely the computers) for the completion of the purchase. The concept already has a few decades but its great boom was with the massive spread of the Internet by what e-commerce became almost synonym of purchases through the Internet.
In the last years, the number of companies that resort to the Internet as sales channel of their products and the business volume made through this channel has been growing exponentially. The transaction’s low cost, time availability, the inexistence of territory limits, to which joins the computers safety systems, the diversity of payment methods and the increasingly attractiveness of the consumers for the use of Internet form the main factors of E-Commerce development. It’s common to divide E-Commerce in several types of agreement with the entities involved in the transaction:
- B2C (Business to Consumer): transaction made from the company to the final consumer, namely through the creation of the called virtual or electronic stores.
- B2B (Business to Business): transaction made between two companies.
- C2C (Consumer to Consumer): transaction made between two private people; this kind became more common with the appearance of specialized Internet sites that allow meeting between the parties.
- G2C (Government to Citizen): commercial transaction (or other relationships) between governmental entities and the citizens.
- G2B (Government to Business): commercial transaction between governmental entities and companies.
