E-commerce refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. E-commerce is the largest sector of the electronics industry and is in turn driven by the technological advances of the semiconductor industry.
Shopping is an activity in which a customer browses the available goods or services presented by one or more retailers with the potential intent to purchase a suitable selection of them. A typology of shopper types has been developed by scholars which identifies one group of shoppers as recreational shoppers, that is, those who enjoy shopping and view it as a leisure activity.
CompuServe, Inc. was an American Internet company that provided an eponymous online service, the first major commercial one in the world. It opened in 1969 as a timesharing and remote access service marketed to corporations. After a successful 1979 venture selling otherwise under-utilized after-hours time to Radio Shack customers, the system was opened to the public, roughly the same time as The Source.
Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is the sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and then sells in smaller quantities to consumers for a profit. Retailers are the final link in the supply chain from producers to consumers.
Electronic business is any kind of business or commercial activity that includes sharing information across the internet. Commerce constitutes the exchange of products and services between businesses, groups, and individuals; and can be seen as one of the essential activities of any business.
JumpStart Games, Inc., formerly Knowledge Adventure, Inc., was an American edutainment video game company based in Torrance, California. Founded in 1991, it was acquired by Chinese holding company NetDragon Websoft in 2017.
Disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in economics from a supply chain, or "cutting out the middlemen" in connection with a transaction or a series of transactions. Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediary, companies may now deal with customers directly, for example via the Internet.
Cendant Corporation was an American provider of business and consumer services, primarily within the real estate and travel industries. In 2005 and 2006, it broke up and spun off or sold its constituent businesses. Although it was based in New York City, the majority of its headquarters employees were in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey.
Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine, which displays the same product's availability and pricing at different e-retailers. As of 2020, customers can shop online using a range of different computers and devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones.
CUC (Comp-U-Card) International Inc. was a membership-based consumer services conglomerate with travel, shopping, auto, dining, home improvement and financial services offered to more than 60 million customers worldwide based in Stamford, Connecticut, US, and founded in 1973 by Kirk Shelton and Walter Forbes. In 1998, it became involved in a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into what, at the time, was the biggest accounting scandal in corporate history.
The marketspace is a marketing and strategic management concept that emerged in the mid-1990s. It refers to a virtual "information-defined transaction space" in contrast to traditional physical marketplaces. The term was introduced by Jeffrey Rayport and John Sviokla in their 1994 article "Managing in the Marketspace" that appeared in Harvard Business Review.
An online marketplace is a type of e-commerce website where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties. Online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel ecommerce and can be a way to streamline the production process.
Walter Forbes is an American corporate executive and former Federal prisoner.
TIAS.com is an online retail marketplace for antiques and collectibles. The company was founded in 1995 and is based in Garden City, New York. The company is privately held.
Jon Callas is an American computer security expert, software engineer, user experience designer, and technologist who is the co-founder and former CTO of the global encrypted communications service Silent Circle. He has held major positions at Digital Equipment Corporation, Apple, PGP, and Entrust, and is considered "one of the most respected and well-known names in the mobile security industry." Callas is credited with creating several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, including OpenPGP, DKIM, and ZRTP, which he wrote. Prior to his work at Entrust, he was Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of PGP Corporation and the former Chief Technical Officer of Entrust.
Book Stacks Unlimited was an American online bookstore created by Charles M. Stack in 1992, three years before Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com. Stack's store, selling new books, began as a dial-up bulletin board located in Cleveland. The Books.com website opened in 1994, eventually attracting a half million visitors each month.
Tmall, formerly Taobao Mall, is a Chinese-language website for business-to-consumer (B2C) online retail, spun off from Taobao, operated in China by Alibaba Group. It is a platform for local Chinese and international businesses to sell brand-name goods to consumers in Greater China. It has over 500 million monthly active users, as of February 2018. In the last few years, it has opened its features to brands, not only for online sales but also for developing brand awareness. According to Alexa Rank, it is the third most visited website globally in 2021.
The economics of digitization is the field of economics that studies how digitization, digitalisation and digital transformation affects markets and how digital data can be used to study economics. Digitization is the process by which technology lowers the costs of storing, sharing, and analyzing data. This has changed how consumers behave, how industrial activity is organized, and how governments operate. The economics of digitization exists as a distinct field of economics for three reasons: it studies a world that is digital, exponential and combinatorial. First, new economic models are needed because digital goods have very low or even zero marginal costs unlike most traditional goods, thus many traditional assumptions no longer hold in a digitized world. Second, the rate of improvement of computers, networks and other engines of digitization, is exponential, as reflected by Moore's Law. Third, digital goods can easily be combined and recombined, increasing their value not only via networks and platforms, but also novel combinations. Each of these effects is important individually, but together they have synergies and constitute a distinct economic landscape.
Dan Kohn was an American serial entrepreneur and nonprofit executive who led the Linux Foundation's Public Health initiative. He was the executive director at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which sustains and integrates open source cloud software including Kubernetes and Fluentd, through 2020. The first company he founded, NetMarket, conducted the first secure commercial transaction on the web in 1994.
The retail format influences the consumer's store choice and addresses the consumer's expectations. At its most basic level, a retail format is a simple marketplace, that is; a location where goods and services are exchanged. In some parts of the world, the retail sector is still dominated by small family-run stores, but large retail chains are increasingly dominating the sector, because they can exert considerable buying power and pass on the savings in the form of lower prices. Many of these large retail chains also produce their own private labels which compete alongside manufacturer brands. Considerable consolidation of retail stores has changed the retail landscape, transferring power away from wholesalers and into the hands of the large retail chains.
