ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

(e-commerce) maintaining business relationships and selling information, services, and commodities by means of computer telecommunications networks. Although in the vernacular e-commerce usually refers only to the trading of goods and services over the Internet, broader economic activity is included. E-commerce consists of business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce as well as internal organizational transactions that support these activities. E-commerce originated in a standard for the exchange of business documents, such as orders or invoices, between suppliers and their business customers. This standard had its inception in the 194849 Berlin blockade and airlift. The U.S. Army quickly discovered that the normal manner of transacting businessaccompanied by paper orderscould not keep up with the necessary flow of goods into Berlin. In order to break the paper bottleneck, Edward A. Guilbert, a logistics officer in the army, set up a system of ordering via telex, radio-teletype, and telephone. Various industries elaborated upon this system in the ensuing decades before the first general standard was published in 1975. The resulting national electronic data interchange (EDI) standard is unambiguous, independent of any particular machine, and flexible enough to handle most simple electronic transactions. With the introduction of the first graphical browser software for accessing the World Wide Web in 1993, and the ensuing scramble for companies and individuals to get online, most e-commerce shifted to the Internet. In some fields new Internet retailers such as the bookseller Amazon.com grew up, seemingly overnight, to challenge the dominance of traditional retailers. Some established companies embraced the electronic commerce model as well. The Intel Corporation, for instance, had sold almost half of its $30 billion in annual computer chip sales directly through its Web site by 1999 and planned to move all of its sales to the Web by the end of 2000. As important as standard forms are for business-to-business transactions, e-commerce encompasses much wider activity. For example, secure electronic transfer of sensitive information (such as credit card numbers and electronic funds transfer orders) is essential to the continued growth of e-commerce. In addition to encrypting Web purchase forms, many individuals also routinely encrypt their e-mail. Among other innovations that have contributed to the growth of e-commerce are electronic directories and search engines for finding information on the Web; software agents, or bots, that act autonomously to locate goods and services; and digital authentication services that vouch for identities over the Internet. These intermediary services facilitate the sale of goods (actually delivering the goods in the case of information), the provision of services such as banking, ticket reservations, and stock market transactions, and even the delivery of remote education and entertainment. Electronic auctions and reverse markets (where a buyer elicits offers from many sellers) are another growing component of e-commerce. From its founding in 1995, the world's largest online open auction site, eBay, grew to more than 5 million members by 1999. Businesses often deploy private networks (intranets) for sharing information and collaborating within the company, usually insulated from the surrounding Internet by computer-security systems known as firewalls. Businesses also frequently rely on extranets, extensions of a company's intranet that allow portions of its internal network to be accessed by collaborating businesses. Access to these extranets is generally restricted via passwords. Several important phenomena are associated with e-commerce. The role of geographic distance in forming business relationships is reduced. Barriers to entry into the retail business are lower, as it is relatively inexpensive to start a retail Web site. Some traditional business intermediaries are being replaced by their electronic equivalents or are being made entirely dispensable. (For instance, as airlines have published fare information and enabled ticketing directly over the Internet, store-front travel agencies have declined.) Prices of commodity products are generally lower on the Weba reflection not merely of the lower costs of doing electronic business but also of the ease of comparison shopping in cyberspace. A new form of corporate cooperation known as a virtual company, which is actually a network of firms, each performing some of the processes needed to manufacture a product or deliver a service, has flourished. Vladimir Zwass