What Is the Difference Between E-Business & E-Commerce?

While many people use e-commerce and e-business interchangeably, they aren't the same, and the
differences matter to businesses in today's economy. The "e" is short for "electronic" or "electronic
network," and both words apply to business that utilizes electronic networks to conduct their commerce
and other business activities. In the same way that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are
squares, all e-commerce companies are e-businesses, but not vice versa.

E-Commerce Definition
E-commerce is “any transaction completed over a computer-mediated network that involves the
transfer of ownership or rights to use goods and services,” defines the U.S. Census Bureau. Transactions
aren't required to have a price and include both sales and items like free downloads. E-commerce
includes transactions made on the internet, Intranet, Extranet, World Wide Web, by email and even by
fax.

E-Business Definition
E-business is broader than e-commerce; including the transaction based e-commerce businesses and
those who run traditionally but cater to online activities as well. An e-business can run any portion of its
internal processes online, including inventory management, risk management, finance, human
resources. For a business to be e-commerce and e-business, it must both sell products online and handle
other company activities or additional sales offline.

E-Business Types And Strategy

According to E-business at Ohio State University, “E-business can work for any business because it
involves the whole business cycle from production, procurement, distribution, sales, payment,
fulfillment, restocking and marketing.” Business strategy is complicated, as it involves four directions of
planning: vertically, laterally, horizontally and downward. Vertical planning coordinates website front
and back-end systems and horizontal planning coordinates e-commerce with customer relationships,
supply-chain management and resource planning. Laterally, you must manage customers, business
partners and suppliers while at the same time integrating new technologies and business processes
downward through the organization.

There are 6 basic types of e-commerce:

Business-to-Business (B2B)

Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C)
Consumer-to-Business (C2B).

Business-to-Administration (B2A)

Consumer-to-Administration (C2A)

Benefits of E-Business Technology

E-Commerce can be a powerful tool for any business.

The Internet has changed the way the world does business, and your company can take advantage of
the technology for its own benefit. E-business is the process of exchanging date or information over the
Internet while taking orders, placing orders or interacting with your own staff, according to online
business resource eCommerce Optimization. By understanding the benefits of e-commerce technology,
your company can be better equipped to use the Internet as a business too

Everyone is Equal
When you are interacting with your clients or vendors using e-business, it is difficult for them to tell how
big your business is. With a professionally developed and maintained website, any small business can
look as impressive on the Internet as the large corporations do. It is a level playing field that helps create
opportunity for small businesses.

Order Entry
An Internet order interface that is hooked directly into your real-time inventory software can allow
customers to order products from your company 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can save
money on hiring a sales staff by opening up an order-entry section on your website for clients that want
to make smaller orders, or for those that only order a few times a year. That frees up your sales
professionals to go out and find new business.

Customer Service
E-Business can save you money on your customer service as well. By making your client's account
information available on the Internet, customers can check their accounts whenever they want. By
creating a customer service section on your website that allows customers to request return product
authorizations, you can increase your customer service levels while lowering your cost of doing business.

Marketing
In the first quarter of 2010, consumers bought $34 billion worth of products and services on the
Internet, according to Antone Gonsalves writing for InformationWeek.com. There was also 1.1 trillion
online advertisements created in the same period, according to InformationWeek.com. More consumers
are using the Internet to get their product information, find vendors and buy products. An e-business
presence can help put your company in touch with this growing retail sector.

Objectives of e-commerce
e-commerce means business over internet, in the most layman-est of terms.

So you harvest all the benefits internet has to offer, some being:

1. Reach out to a larger audience - internet access is becoming so mainstream now that your
product/service can reach almost everyone on the planet with a internet-enabled device.

2. Your virtual shop remains open and operational 24x7 even if you/your staff are not working- this
might not be wholly true if your product is a service-which requires immediate human-intervention

3. In most cases; you need not maintain the whole stock of products - again this varies for different
business models and will work greatly if you have a good supplier who does not defaults on supplies and
a good shipping partner/team who work in sync for delivery

4. You build your brand more quickly - as more people will know and talk and post and blog about you
on social networks - duh! :)

5. Once your brand is build you can diversify easily and also pull out of a certain segment if that does not
works out for you with minimal losses -

typical example will be Flipkart's music(tunes) store which closed off even being a great initiative.

6. For most part; setting up a website and maintaining it is lots cheaper given the plethora of hosting
services available.

7. Also with the new crop of 3PL partners (within India) like Aramex, Delhivery etc your shipping can also
be outsourced.
E.Commerace Technology

Five emerging technologies could change ecommerce in just the next few years, giving
shoppers new access to products and the ability to customize some items for their particular
needs.

Mobile computing, cryptocurrencies, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, and augmented reality

each have the potential to dramatically change how, when, and why shoppers make Internet-
enabled purchases.

Each technology’s impact could touch, if you will, a different part of the ecommerce business
model.

1. Mobile Computing

It may seem odd to describe mobile computing as an emerging technology given the number of
tablets and smartphones in use or, as predictive analytics firm Custora, points out, perhaps 37
percent of ecommerce site traffic now comes from mobile devices.

Nonetheless, mobile still has the potential to grow significantly in at least two ways: form factor
and functionality.

At the moment, most mobile devices are rectangular bricks of various sizes. These candy-bar
shared interfaces give shoppers access to just about anything on the web and millions of
applications. But smartphones and tablets will have to make room for other shapes of mobile
devices including products like Google Glass, Pebble Smartwatches, or even automobile-based
mobile computing.

These new form factors will mean that shoppers may have a greater ability to shop, and could
lead to new purchase patterns that impact how products are sold.

For example, think about what would happen when you combine a new mobile form factor like
Google Glass or similar with an emerging mobile functionality, mobile image recognition. In
theory, a person could be walking along a busy street, see a fashionably dressed person, touch
the Google Glass, and instantly have the ability to buy the outfit that person was wearing from a
favorite ecommerce retailer. If that doesn’t represent a change to ecommerce, what does?

2. Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, and it is almost certainly the best known. While many
online retailers are concerned that the electronic money may be too volatile, those stores that do
accept it find it to be “a viable, preferable alternative to credit cards that don’t carry the same risk
of fraud and have lower transaction fees,” according to Mashable.

Adding Bitcoin to an ecommerce site is very easy, and retailers that are nervous about Bitcoin’s
rapidly changing value can instantly exchange Bitcoin for other currencies, like dollars. Perhaps
the least-known benefit of using Bitcoin, as Mashable pointed out, is that there is almost no fraud
— from the merchant’s perspective — or chargebacks, making it safer for ecommerce merchants
to sell internationally even to nations with relatively high rates of credit card fraud.

3. Autonomous Vehicles

Google and Amazon have both been experimenting with same-day delivery services in select
markets. This same-day delivery trend is likely to have a significant impact on Internet retailing.

Of course, one of the greatest challenges to same-day delivery is cost. It is expensive to put a
driver in a car and drive to someone’s house every time they place an online order.

There are ways to help reduce the cost of on-demand delivery, including optimizing delivery
routes or distributing pick-up locations. Autonomous vehicles could also help to reduce the cost
of offering same-day delivery. And while the technology may be some number of years off, the
ability to deliver products to customers in hours instead of days will change ecommerce.

4. 3D Printing

Recently Amazon announced its new 3D printing store, which features items made on 3D
printers.

Amazon’s approach to 3D printing technology seems to focus on the technology’s ability to

decrease the time required to take a product from design to market. The supply chain is almost
unchanged in this approach. There is a manufacturer, perhaps a distributor, and a retailer. The
major difference is that the manufacturer can come up with new designs in hours or even create
custom products for individual shoppers.

It would also be possible for some retailers to become manufacturers. An online shop selling
drawer pulls could easily add a line of 3D printed pulls that could be customized and made to
order.

It is also possible that some shoppers will have their own 3D printers, and that they may wish to
buy downloadable designs. To further the drawer pull example, a shopper could have the option
to order the product or download it for a slightly lower rate.

Finally, some are predicting the rise of 3D printing centers where consumers could bring a
downloaded 3D design and print it out. This trend, if it happened, could also create new
ecommerce opportunities.

5. Augmented Reality

If you trust Wikipedia’s definition, “augmented reality is a live direct or indirect view of a
physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by
computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics, or GPS data.”
Put simply, augmented reality adds data to what we see around us. Similar to mobile image
recognition, augmented reality has the potential to turn everyday activities like commuting to
work or going to the park to play Frisbee into an opportunity to discover products that we might
like to buy.

If augmented reality becomes a reality, it will certainly impact ecommerce.