E-COMMERCE TREND

As we know E-Commerce is all kinds of activities related to both sales transactions and purchases of goods or services can be performed using the electronic, internet or computer network. E-commerce is a part of E-Business, which is doing business (all kind of business) by using internet. E-commerce was first introduced in 1994. Originally, electronic commerce meant the utilization of commercial transactions, such as the use electronic data interchange (EDI) to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. Then e-commerce evolved into an activity that has the more appropriate term, namely trade web which means the purchase of goods and services over the internet like the World Wide Web (WWW) via a secure server (HTTPS), a protocol specific server that uses encryption to keep critical customers data.

So many company use e-commerce for purchasing and selling activities because by using e-commerce they can access any time and can doing business in 24 hours. E-commerce also can reduce operational cost and make customer easier to access information about products and service. Company also can reach broader customer.  There are several types of e-commerce, which are Business to Business (B2B), Business-to-Consumer (B2C), Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C), Consumer to Business (C2B), Government to Citizen (G2C), and also mobile commerce (m-commerce).

B2B occurs among companies, such as between company and supplier, company and distributor to buy products or raw materials in huge amount for doing business. One example of largest B2B website is www.alibaba.com. B2C is buying and selling transactions from Company to customers, such as www.bhineka.com or www.amazon.com. B2C means company can sells product and services directly to customers. If customers can interact with other customers, which means customers can be seller or buyer, the mechanism we called it Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C). The example of C2C website is www.shopee.com, www.elevenia.com, www.tokopedia.com, etc.

Consumer to Business (C2B) usually occurs when one individual user or company wants to buy products and services from suppliers, but need to compare the offerings from suppliers in the beginning. The example of C2B is www.traveloka.com when we can compare several offerings from companies as supplier for products and services. G2C uses by government to the public to send variety of information, and also public can access government website, such as e-tax to input online individual tax. M-commerce (Mobile Commerce) is e-commerce activities occurs mobile phone through mobile application. M-Banking, Uber, Gojek, Grab, social media applications are examples for M-commerce.