E-COMMERCE, E-BUSINESS, WHO E-CARES?

Some analysts and on-line business people have decided that e-business is infinitely superior as a moniker to e-commerce. That’s misleading and distracts us from the business goals at hand. The effort to separate the E-commerce and E-business concepts appears to have been driven by marketing motives and is dreadfully thin in substance.Here’s the important thing: E-commerce, E-business or whatever else you may want to call it is a means to an end. The different names, definitions and words referred to in the previous sections are merely a sample of the glossary that has originated from marketing departments to sell a concept, the media to describe a sensational ‘new’ phenomenon, consultants to justify their fees and recommendations, and business to validate and implement the new technology. In fact there is no one definitive meaning of e-commerce or e-business that is universally established. The different terms are used to illustrate different perspectives and emphases of different people in different organizations and business sectors. Some argue that it makes little sense to have a restrictive definition for the term e-commerce since it is unlikely that there will be agreement on a single unique definition. ‘Attempting to define E-commerce or E-business is guaranteed to generate Byzantine debates with meaningless origins. It reminds me of trying to answer the following question: “If one synchronized swimmer drowns, would the others follow?”’ Because of this trend, it is necessary when undertaking any electronic commerce, electronic business or any other e-related project or assignment, to clearly define any term in the context and environment in which it is being used.

AN E-DISTINCTION

For the purpose of clarity, the distinction between e-commerce and e- business in this book is based on the respective terms commerce and business. Commerce is defined as embracing the concept of trade, ‘exchange of merchandise on a large scale between different countries’. By association, e-commerce can be seen to include the electronic medium for this exchange. Thus electronic commerce can be broadly defined as the exchange of merchandise (whether tangible or intangible) on a large scale between different countries using an electronic medium – namely the Internet. The implications of this are that e-commerce incorporates a whole socio-economic, telecommunications technology and commercial infrastructure at the macro-environmental level. All these elements interact together to provide the fundamentals of e-commerce.

Business, on the other hand, is defined as ‘a commercial enterprise as a going concern’. E-business can broadly be defined as the processes or areas involved in the running and operation of an organization that are electronic or digital in nature. These include direct business activities such as marketing, sales and human resource management but also indirect activities such as business process re-engineering and change management, which impact on the improvement in efficiency and integration of business processes and activities.

Figure illustrates the major differences in e-commerce and e-business, where e-commerce has a broader definition referring more to the macro-environment, e-business relates more to the micro-level of the firm.Although different, both e-commerce and e-business are also highly integrated and reliant upon each other.