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What is Ecommerce and how does it work?

E-commerce or Electronic commerce is business transactions on the internet. There are many different forms of E-commerce: Business to Business, Business to Consumer, Consumer to Consumer, M-commerce and F-commerce. A lot of businesses are using this to their advantage for increasing their online sales.

E-commerce is gaining popularity every day with the daily internet users going up and up. People like having the ability to purchase orders from their phones or computers. The U.S. Census Bureau Statistics states that sales have almost double from 5%-10% in the first quarter of 2019. Not to mention the projected increase of nearly 14% to all retail sales in the United States by 2021.

Facebook Commerce (F-commerce)

Facebook is a powerhouse platform for reaching consumers and businesses. With the ability to contact so many different people through Facebook, it is a great idea to put a link for your online website where sales can be made. Small businesses especially rely on social media to draw their consumers in. F-commerce is much like B2C and M-commerce in nature of sales.

Facebook can be accessed through a cell-phone, which is why it can be used so often. Compared to other media platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.,) Facebook is the best route to go for a professional set up.

Mobile Commerce (M-commerce)

M-commerce, much like F-commerce is when consumers are accessing online transactions through a mobile device. A very popular example of M-commerce is any ticket that is purchased from a mobile app on the mobile device. Having a ticket available from your phone doesn’t necessarily speed any processes up, but it definitely helps with convenience of things.

Convenience to the user is what makes M-commerce so popular. It is much easier to bring your phone or laptop places, than have to print something out and show/use it. Many small to large businesses are creating their own Mobile applications that can be used for online purchases from major retailers.

Business-to-Business (B2B)

B2B sales is exactly what it sounds like. Businesses are selling products and services to other businesses. From the news and other media sources, you hear a lot about Business-to-Consumer sales. However, B2B sales deal with very large amounts of money in transactions. These businesses are buying items in bulk, which also involve retailers, manufacturers and traders. These entities have huge purchasing power.

E-commerce has tremendously helped businesses out for times sake. Almost everything now is automated. Say a company needs 10,000 lids for a container, it will be automatically shipped to the consumer who needs the product. There are algorithms built into e-commerce applications that will automatically ship supplies once a product number gets too low.

Businesses also have the ability to have their price tracked through E-commerce. For large companies, even some small, prices fluctuate very often. The program can have the product automatically purchased if the price drops below a certain set point. All of these options can help with responsible financial allocation.

Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

Business-to-Consumer is the most popular form of E-commerce. Any time a business makes a sales transaction online to a consumer, that is considered E-commerce. There are some businesses that don’t even have a store location, only online sales. A perfect example of this is Amazon, the most popular online retailer in the world.

According to Statista, Amazon Sales are continuing to sky rocket. Sales are consistently reaching 35-70 billion dollars each quarter. That is yearly total of more than 200 billion dollars. Moving that much money to consumers each year clearly means that E-commerce and Shopify advancements are working.

There is a lot of evidence that is backed up from statistical information which indicates reasonings for multiple large company retailers going out of business. Major retailers like JC Penny, Toys R Us & Macy’s have all closed some or all stores because of E-commerce business.

What makes online purchasing so easy, is the simplistic way of entering a debit or credit card into a system and using that as a payment. It usually only has to be done once or twice and the information is saved and can be easily re-entered or accessed through a saved account.

Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C)

C2C is a form of bartering online. Sites such as Ebay and Craigslist are very popular trading websites. These auction websites are a great way to find cheaper prices on products, or just to find out if some products may be overpriced on other websites.

Payment options are very similar, except the payment is just going to the other consumer instead of a business or corporation. C2C is more of a leisure by for some people, but there are some who make business out of buying cheap from auction websites and selling to others for a higher price.