What is eCommerce? And its types

If you think that you can sell products, goods and services only by having a shop of your own then hold on a min when i tell you about eCommerce, you can use internet and sell your products, goods and service to the customers you have never seen and who may be staying miles away from you. This concept of Electronic selling was invented in 1979 much before first world wide web(WWW) was written(1990).

eCommerce definition

Why limit your products/service to be sold only in your neighborhood when the whole world can see and buy the things that you want to sell. eCommerce is selling goods (physical/virtue) over internet. And when you sell something in this way it has many names like an online shop, eshop, e-store, Internet shop, webshop, webstore, online store, or virtual store. Web provides not only a 24-hour-a-day showcase for your products but a quick way to reach the right people who will be interested in your products.

Types of eCommerce

Based on customers

• Business to Business (B2B) – As the name, Businesses selling goods/services to other businesses. You can say manufacturers to wholesalers or from one business entity to another. Ex: paypal, Google selling business tools like docs, adwords to businesses, or steel manufactures selling to wholesale dealers etc
• Business to Consumer (B2C) – a platform where businesses sells to consumers like amazon, flipkart, justdial
• Consumer to consumer (C2C) – a platform where consumer post the things they want to sell and other consumer can directly buy from them. ex: Sulekha, ebay etc
• Consumer to Business (C2B) – example of this can be again justdial where consumer can post their requirement and businesses can contact them. say consumer planning for a trip and tour operators making offers or naukri.com
• Peer to Peer(P2P) – People can directly share computer files and computer resources without having to go through a central web server. To use this, both sides need to install the required software so that they can communicate on the common platform. ex: uTorrent, Zshare etc.
• Business to Employee (B2E) – Employee of any company can order for a say new toner cartridge and printer paper within the organization where the order is entirely electronic, and supervisors are asked to approved the requisition. If you have worked in any big corporate you will surely know this

Based on Products sold

• Physical or tangible products/goods say books, gadgets, furniture, appliances, and the like. Ex: Flipkart, Amazon
• Digital goods, like software, movies, ebooks, music, text, images, video etc. Ex: stock photographs, itunes
• Services, have huge variety,  travel tickets, movie tickets, insurance, and many more. Ex: Irctc, Bookmyshow, cleartrip etc.