Originally, "electronic commerce" meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, usually using technology like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to send commercial documents like purchase orders[?] or invoices[?] electronically.
Today it includes things that may more correctly be termed "Web commerce" -- the purchase of goods and services over the World Wide Web via secure server (HTTPS, a special server which encrypts confidential ordering data for customer protection) with e-shopping carts and electronic pay services, like credit card pay authorizations.
Electronic commerce may also involve the electronic transfer of information between businesses (EDI).
So, e-commerce is the conduct of business communications and management through electronic methods, such as electronic data interchange and automated data collection systems.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump