Difference between e-commerce and e-business

Unfortunately, e-business and e-commerce are sometimes used interchangeably; however, they are completely two different terms. The confusion lies in the word commerce which is often considered as business. In English language, commerce can be considered as business, however, when these words are attached with the letter e, it brings separate meanings. This article will highlight some of the difference between e-commerce and e-business. Amongst various differences between e-commerce and e-business, some of the major differences are described here:

• E-business can be considered as an umbrella term and e-commerce is a small part of the broader term. In other words, e-commerce is just a subset of e-business.
• The term e-commerce usually refers to monetary transactions that mainly include the buying or selling or products or services. However, other business functions like marketing, customer education, customer support, getting raw materials etc come under the term of e-business as they all are business functions.
• If you are successfully selling something, that is considered as an e-commerce activity. However, brining customers to your website by efficiently marketing your product and maintaining the standard of your website is an e-business activity. Moreover, educating your customers about the website and about the products or services is also an e-business activity. To order to have a successful e-business, you need to get the appreciation of the customers and you need to use tools and techniques that can help you in bringing healthy amount of customers towards your website. Moreover, your website needs to have a better search engine rating which is an e-business activity.
• Let us look at a real-life example. We all know that Dell sell its computers, laptops, computer accessories, printer, monitors etc online. How it can relate to e-business? The first thing that happens is that the visitor visits the website of Dell and navigates it using the navigational tools. As the website is quite user friendly, the visitor doesn’t feel any difficult in finding the particular computer or laptop he/she is looking for. He/she finds all information related to that product. This information includes the pricing information as well as technical information about the product. The information should be precise, clear and should be able to clear most of the doubts of the visitor. Note that there hasn’t been any monetary transaction done yet, what all going so far comes under the term of e-business.
• The term e-commerce is often described as outward process as it involves processes like reaching the customers, any external partner, external suppliers etc. On the other hand, e-business covers various internal processes like content management, risk management, inventory management, production management, finance management and other internal business processes.

If you are willing to start your e-business, you must think about all business processes while outsourcing the e-commerce services using various web development companies or freelancers like those that are available in London. E-commerce can be considered as an online way of transaction while e-business can be described as the management of various business functions that enable successful transactions and growth of the business.

Tags: designer, Developer, e-commerce, ebusiness, Freelance, solution

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 16:23 and is filed under Ecommerce, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.