Basic E-commerce Definitions

History & Definition of E-Commerce2

E-commerce as an expression became known in Germany in the 90s - initially it meant the Sale of goods and services via the Internet. Previously, there was already electronic commerce in the USA via the online service Compuserve. In Germany, services were sold via earlier forms of T-Online, the so-called Screen text (btx).

Closely related to the concept of e-commerce is the so-called electronic business or digital business. This refers to any digital connection between sellers and buyers. Basically, this also includes EDI, the electronic data exchange in the context of transaction processes, which has become more and more widespread in business between companies since the 80s.

E-commerce can be divided, for example, by the type of actors:

• B2C: Business to consumer when retailers sell to consumers.  
• B2B: Business to business when it comes to business relationships between companies, i.e. between manufacturers (e.g. at different production stages) or between manufacturers and wholesalers/dealers, but also for the relationship between wholesale and retail. 
• D2C: Direct to Consumer, when a manufacturer or service provider sells directly to consumers using electronic support. 

One can certainly differentiate this classification even further - integrate the trade of consumers among themselves or public bodies, i.e. the administration, etc. In the main, however, companies – if they do not primarily work for the public sector – focus on the above three categories.

In addition, one aspect of e-commerce has become more and more relevant in recent years: Electronic marketplaces. The biggest one is certainly Amazon. Companies can set up products, whose data is to maintain the Shop and part of the logistics infrastructure in order to sell Goods and services.

E-Commerce Software

In the early days of the commercial Internet, websites and online shops were programmed manually. Initially, there were content management systems (CMS) that made content easier to maintain and manage. From the mid-90s, the first software for the development and Operation of online shops came on the market. In particular, the Intershop software developed in Jena should be mentioned here. Unlike CMS, Shop systems – today, for example, shopware, Spryker, commerce tools or Shopify - have to cover a wide range of functionalities. This starts with a product database, the consideration of availabilities, the integrability of various search and configuration options, possibilities for the integration of bulk orders and favorite lists in B2B commerce, shopping cart functionalities, payment mechanisms, customer databases, returns functionalities and numerous interfaces to the most diverse systems.

Product databases

If not quite a few products are to be sold, data for them must necessarily be managed via a database. There are f

• Texts – Titles, headings, product short and long descriptions, sales pitches, etc.
• Attribute values such as colors, sizes, weights, shapes, imprints of technical parameters (e.g. number of USB-C ports),
• Assets such as product photos, ambience or action photos, dimensional drawings, videos, operating instructions, certificates and much more
• Inventory data, which informs whether a product is available and how long the delivery period is, if any.

Products are usually assigned to Product categories due to their nature (e.g. shirts, T-shirts, trousers), for which category pages are usually created elsewhere in the e-commerce software - either automatically or manually. The products of the category are then automatically shown. Added category texts and photos, which are usually the search engine optimization (SEO) can then be still.

Product Search

Customers do not like to browse categories. For online shops with a slightly larger product scope, in most cases the product search is used first - search terms are entered into a search mask. For the operator of the online shop, it is extremely important at this point to show the most suitable results first. Special tools such as Elasticsearch or FACT Finder are now being used for this purpose. It configures the weight of text and attribute fields for the search – for example, hits in the headline should always be rated higher than in product long texts. In addition to the pure result lists, Filter structures are usually also built up. For example, buyers who were looking for a "chino" can filter by gender, color or size. In addition, mechanisms are required with which the products can be sorted by price, rating, popularity or availability and/or and/or filtered, for example.