The face of eCommerce The popular image of eCommerce is that of a splashy web page, full of products and advertisements. In fact, that web page is the public façade of a remarkable system that connects front-end presentation of products and services, personalized to user preferences, to a back-end of databases used to manage product inventories, customer profiles, transaction histories, payments, and more.

eC The definition of eCommerce is … … the conduct of commerce via digital means, as in the buying and selling of goods and services on-line.

eC defined The U.S. Census Bureau defines Electronic Commerce as “the sales of goods and services where an order is placed by the buyer or the price and terms of sale are negotiated over an Internet, extranet, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) network, electronic mail, or other online system; payment may or may not be made on-line”.[1][1] [1] U.S. Department of Commerce, May 2002.

By these definitions, virtually all commercial activity could soon be categorized as eCommerce.

eC The U.S. Bureau of the Census has embarked on a major program to map and measure the digital economy. A position paper entitled “Measuring Electronic Business” describes the official measurement framework, defines terms, and outlines sample statistical data formats.

The framework and datasets from the U.S. Manufacturing sector (from ’98 to ’00) that follow the government model can be found at

Electronic Commerce … is alive and well, and growing rapidly, in spite of the “dot com” market phenomenon of too much money chasing too few financial opportunities.

eC The real story of Electronic Commerce lies somewhere between revolution and evolution. Revolution, whereby new services emerge and entire economic sectors are transformed, and evolution, whereby existing businesses can adapt and adopt the new approaches as part of ongoing development and self-assessment.

eC Commerce was not a design goal or even a remote consideration of the early Internet. We have moved from an environment that emphasized casual communication and file sharing to one that supports the electronic transfer of funds, and the expectations have changed accordingly

We have moved from an environment that emphasized casual communication and file sharing to one that supports the electronic transfer of funds, and the expectations have changed accordingly. In an on-line banking application, 99% reliability is just not good enough.

eC What we are observing is a fascinating, historic high-stakes technical re-tooling of the underlying protocols and practices of the Internet to support robust and secure digital transactions, and their use within routine human activities in business, government, education, and beyond.

eC There is now a demand for technologies that support comprehensive user authentication, encrypted communication, and digital certification that provably connects people to on-line actions. The subsequent need to balance the required security with an acceptable level of privacy remains as a challenge. How much privacy are users willing to sacrifice in exchange for security and convenience features?

eC The permeation of Information Technologies throughout the eCommerce transaction and the internal business practices of the organization have become more generally known as eBusiness. The evolution of these technologies, ranging from integrity checks and fraud detection to information extraction, will be investigated in this course.