Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
by 1998, from electronic (compare e-mail) + commerce.
Wiktionary
n. commercial activity conducted via the Internet.
Wikipedia
Electronic commerce, commonly written as e-commerce or eCommerce, is the trading or facilitation of trading in products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet or online social networks. Electronic 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. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web for at least one part of the transaction's life cycle although it may also use other technologies such as e-mail.
E-commerce businesses may employ some or all of the following:
- Online shopping web sites for retail sales direct to consumers
- Providing or participating in online marketplaces, which process third-party business-to-consumer or consumer-to-consumer sales
- Business-to-business buying and selling
- Gathering and using demographic data through web contacts and social media
- Business-to-business electronic data interchange
- Marketing to prospective and established customers by e-mail or fax (for example, with newsletters)
- Engaging in pretail for launching new products and services
- Online financial exchanges for currency exchanges or trading purposes
Usage examples of "e-commerce".
Because my own network people have already cleaned house on my holding company, my Bangalore suppliers, those Chinese rocket people, and all of my e-commerce interests.
Besides tracking content use and distribution, the DOI allows to seamlessly integrate hitherto disparate e-commerce technologies and facilitate interoperability among DRM systems.
But really, what fool would go to all that effort to steal one credit card number when many e-commerce companies make the mistake of storing all their customer financial information unencrypted in their databases?
Cluttered ads, paid subscriptions, e-commerce enabled forms - all reduce the site's credibility!
To collaborate with Amazon - one of the members of a duopoly as far as B2C e-commerce goes - a non-US publisher (no matter how substantial) has to work with a US distributor and thus forgo a large portion of its revenues (payable to the distributor as commissions).
We buy web servers, database management systems, e-commerce packages, and add customer-specific content.
E-commerce, for instance, is a long way off (though m-commerce might be sooner in countries like the Czech Republic or the Baltic).
But even there, only a minuscule number of businesses took advantage of e-commerce (though the countries of Central Europe and the Baltic may be the global pioneers of m-commerce due to their wireless networks).
People are likely to prefer personal banking, window shopping and the social experience of the shopping mall to Internet banking and e-commerce, or m-commerce.