e-Commerce

e-Commerce, also sometimes written without the hyphen (ecommerce or eCommerce), is an abbreviation for electronic commerce, generally defined as an exchange of money for goods or services that is mediated by a computer network, typically the Internet. The roots of e-commerce can be traced back to a certain degree to the early 1970s and the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), an experimental decentralized computer network that is generally considered to be a primary precursor to the modern Internet. However, e-commerce as it is understood in the early 21st century did not appear until the mid-1990s, just as commercialized access to the Internet was beginning to accelerate. Since then, the Internet has become an engrained part of everyday life, even in many countries with underdeveloped ...