E-commerce is the activity of electronically buying or selling products on online services 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.
eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that brokers customer to customer and retail sales through online marketplaces in 190 markets worldwide. Sales occur either via online auctions or "buy it now" instant sales, and the company charges commissions to sellers upon sales. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in September 1995. It has 134 million yearly active buyers worldwide and handled $74 billion in transactions in 2022, 49% of which was in the United States. In 2022, the company had a take rate of 13.25%.
Epinions.com was a general consumer review site established in 1999. Epinions was acquired in 2003 by DealTime, later Shopping.com, which was acquired by eBay in 2005. Epinions users could access paid product reviews; the company sold advertising on its site and shared the revenue with authors as an incentive for quality content. Competition from sites that crowdsourced reviews for free led to years of financial decline. On 25 March 2014, all community features, and features for submitting and editing reviews, were disabled. Subsequently, in May 2018, the site was fully closed down, and URLs in the epinions.com domain redirect to Shopping.com.
An online auction is an auction held over the internet and accessed by internet connected devices. Similar to in-person auctions, online auctions come in a variety of types, with different bidding and selling rules.
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.
Intuit Inc. is an American multinational business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparation application TurboTax, personal finance app Mint, the small business accounting program QuickBooks, the credit monitoring service Credit Karma, and email marketing platform Mailchimp. As of 2019, more than 95% of its revenues and earnings come from its activities within the United States.
MercadoLibre, Inc. is an Argentine company headquartered in Montevideo, Uruguay and incorporated in the United States that operates online marketplaces dedicated to e-commerce and online auctions. As of 2016, Mercado Libre had 174.2 million users in Latin America, making it the region's most popular e-commerce site by number of visitors. The company has operations in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. In 2023 Time included Mercado Libre in the list of the 100 most influential companies in the world.
Kijiji.ca is a Canadian online classified advertising website and part of eBay Classifieds Group, which was acquired by Adevinta in 2020. It operates sections for cities and urban regions, for posting local advertisements. Kijiji was launched in February 2005 as an eBay subsidiary and became part of the eBay Classifieds Group in 2007. The Kijiji brand is used in more than 100 cities in Canada, while eBay Classifieds websites are available under different brands in other countries. Kijiji parent is Dutch company Marktplaats BV since 2005, which is part of the same group.
eBay Enterprise, Inc. was a multinational e-commerce corporation that specialized in creating, developing and running online shopping sites for brick and mortar brands and retailers. The company also provided a variety of marketing, consumer engagement, customer care, payment processing, fulfillment, fraud detection, and technology integration services.
Shopping.com is a price comparison service owned by eBay and operates websites in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia. Shopping.com started out with the name DealTime.com which now redirects users to Shopping.com.
Web.com is an American dot-com company that provides a website builder, along with website hosting, domain name registration, web development, and various digital marketing services. It serves as a partner for very small to small-sized businesses and entrepreneurs, assisting them in establishing and expanding their online presence.
Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves social media and online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist online buying and selling of products and services.
Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. Magento source code is distributed under Open Software License. Magento was acquired by Adobe Inc in May 2018 for $1.68 billion.
PFSweb, Inc. is a provider of business-to-business (B2B) and direct-to-consumer (DTC) order fulfillment and customer service for eCommerce. The company was founded in 1994 in the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas. In 2023, the company was acquired by GXO Logistics in an all-cash deal worth approximately US$181 million. PFSweb's corporate headquarters were relocated to Allen, Texas in March 2012 with call center operations moved to downtown Dallas, Texas.
Zong was a mobile payment company that allowed users to make micropayments on the Internet if they have a postpaid mobile phone. The payments were charged to their mobile phone bills by the mobile operator. The company was acquired by eBay in 2011 and disappeared in 2015.
Wix.com Ltd. is an Israeli software company, publicly listed in the US, that provides cloud-based web development services. It offers tools for creating HTML5 websites and mobile sites using online drag-and-drop editing. Along with its headquarters and other offices in Israel, Wix also has offices in Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, the United States, Ukraine, and Singapore.
Customer to customer markets provide a way to allow customers to interact with each other. Traditional markets require business to customer relationships, in which a customer goes to the business in order to purchase a product or service. In customer to customer markets, the business facilitates an environment where customers can sell goods or services to each other. Other types of markets include business to business (B2B) and business to customer (B2C).
AliExpress is an online retail service based in China and owned by the Alibaba Group. Launched in 2010, it is made up of small businesses in China and other locations, such as Singapore, that offer products to international online buyers. It is the most visited e-commerce website in Russia and was the 10th most popular website in Brazil. It facilitates small businesses to sell to customers all over the world. AliExpress has drawn comparison to eBay, as sellers are independent and use the platform to offer products to buyers.
Volo Commerce is an ecommerce technology provider with offices in Cheltenham. The company was privately owned and funded by venture capital investment firm, Notion Capital, until its acquisition by FOG Software Group in September 2019.
