If you are looking to start a business where you will be selling products through the Internet, you are going to be one of the millions of people who have made careers in the world of what is now known as e-commerce.
What is Ecommerce?
The term e-commerce can essentially be defined as the activity of buying and selling products and/or services through online channels (i.e. the Internet). E-commerce first emerged in the 60s through electronic data interchange.
With the advent of the internet becoming more accessible around the world, the 90s and early 2000s saw a massive boom in the ecommerce industry with the likes of Amazon becoming giants after having started off from the founder’s garage back in ’95.
Over the years, the e-commerce industry has seen development with advancing technology taking the helm. With the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, mobile devices, and ever-increasing accessibility to the internet around the world, e-commerce has become an expansive field. Proper enterprise-level businesses now make up a strong portion of the e-commerce industry, and it is estimated that in four years’ time, e-commerce is going to make up for almost 20 per cent of all retail sales in the United States. With communications technology improving every passing day, the numbers are going to keep on increasing in the US and around the world as we move forward.
Different Ecommerce Categories
E-commerce has now become a proper industry and has branched out to what are considered 4 categories of the industry:
- B2C: The business-to-consumer category is what constitutes businesses selling to the general public via software operating online without customers having to interact with any representative from the business.
- B2B: The business to business category consists of businesses conducting trade with one another for instance when a wholesale business is selling to distributors.
- C2B: The consumer to business category is when customers post a project on the internet and businesses conduct bids in order to get to work on that project. An example of C2B ecommerce is Elance.
- C2C: Consumer to consumer ecommerce is what happens in online marketplaces where people buy and sell goods on an online platform like eBay and Craigslist.
Starting Ecommerce
To explain the matter quite simply, if you have a product that you can sell or services that you can provide, you can use tools available on the internet which you can use to get started.
WordPress is a great example of a platform that allows an easy-to-use and ready-to-operate template so that you can start up an online store and run your own e-commerce business. As the proprietor of the business, you will need to figure out how you can collect payment from your customers. Credit card payment options and PayPal are two very popular ways to go about it. If you’re selling physical products, you also need to figure out how you’re going to ship the products to your customers.
In Conclusion
E-commerce is an industry that is huge, and yet it continues to grow. With e-commerce having been around for a long time now, there are proper laws governing the sophistication of the whole e-commerce ecosystem that are designed to protect both the proprietors and consumers. Best of luck starting out!
