What is e-commerce?

• E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the buying and selling of goods

and services, or the transmitting of funds or data, over an electronic
network, primarily the internet. These business transactions occur
either as business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C),
consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to-business.
• The terms e-commerce and e-business are often used
interchangeably. The term e-tail is also sometimes used in reference
to the transactional processes that make up online retail shopping.
E-commerce Origin and Growth
• E-commerce originated in a standard for the exchange of business
documents, such as orders or invoices, between suppliers and their business
customers. Those origins date to the 1948–49 Berlin blockade and airlift
 with a system of ordering goods primarily via telex. 
• With the wide adoption of the Internet and the introduction of the 
World Wide Web in 1991 and of the first browser for accessing it in 1993,
most e-commerce shifted to the Internet. More recently, with the global
spread of smartphones and the accessibility of fast broadband connections
to the Internet, much e-commerce moved to mobile devices, which also
included tablets, laptops, and wearable products such as watches.