Electronic Commerce (e-commerce) is the movement of everything involving business to the Internet and the World Wide Web (www). It is the way of buying and selling information, products and services via Internet. Companies involved in a transaction interact electronically in a way similar to businesses using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) concept.

Companies have been using EDI to conduct business transaction include ordering, invoicing and making payments since 1980’s. But the high cost and maintenance of the networks make this method impractical for small and medium sized business. So now Internet and www has been introduced to overcome the technical difficulty of EDI.

Efficiency, intelligence and availability are the major benefits of e-commerce. Those e-commerce benefits are the results of digitalization of business information and availability of Internet. It improves the efficiency of information capturing, storing and processing and facilitates extracting business intelligence from data. Information on the Internet can be accessed and transmitted without geographical boundary and time constraint.

Potentially, e-commerce will lead to simplifier, faster and more efficient business transactions. It also shifts business focus from retail and physical stores to the virtual business, which will affect both manufacturers and consumers.