Electronic commerce, also known as e-commerce, refers to purchases and sales carried out via the Internet (or other forms of remote data transmission). Early manifestations of e-commerce were found in the online portals of the 1980s, especially in the form of the Electronic Mall at Compuserve.
Buyers and sellers conclude sales contracts online; often the business is largely automated. In a broader sense, e-commerce encompasses any type of commercial transaction in which Internet service providers, including those that are not trading companies, and Internet consumers use electronic communication technologies as transaction partners in the context of the initiation, agreement or provision of services. An IBM advertising campaign in the late 1990s popularized the term electronic business as “eBusiness.” In the narrower sense, e-commerce encompasses the business relationships carried out via the Internet between Internet retailers (i.e. trading companies that use the Internet exclusively or (as multi-channel retailers) in addition to their brick-and-mortar or traditional mail order business) and Internet consumers. Goods from the presented offer can be selected and included in a ‘shopping cart’, analogous to shopping at a stationary retail company. The order process is completed by submitting and confirming the order online.
Evolution of Web Shop Software Systems
A shop system is the software basis of online shops. It is mostly database-based and is offered as a web application. The providers differ in the orientation of their offerings to different target groups. There is software at a low price as well as open source software for the mass market and providers who specialize in creating or optimizing software individually according to the requirements.
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From 1995 to the present day, a wide range of different shop systems has been developed. The feature set has increased drastically over the years and has changed a lot due to different business needs. Many shop systems can present the content of the shop in several languages. Translation memory systems (TMS) are used to translate this content.
The first shop systems between 1995 and 2000 attempted to replicate the traditional department store and were primarily concerned with the pure presentation of products and the purchase process. These are referred to as the storefront system.
By 2001, the first administrative functionalities had been added to the shop systems; such as the management of orders (order management features). By 2006, the demands on the administrative functionalities of the shop system had increased. Among other things, functionalities such as product databases, content management (CMS), customer registration and administration became a natural part of the standard shop systems (administration features). Until 2009, in addition to the pure requirements for administrative processes, the requirements of the customers came to the fore from the point of view of the shop operator. For example, functionalities relating to customer account management as well as the management of personal wish lists and help functions have been further developed. As a result, the requirements for data protection and security have also risen sharply (Customer Features/Security).
The current development of shop systems since 2010 has involved the customer/user even more, so functionalities around the topic of Web 2.0 (e.g. customer reviews, personal recommendations and social media) are pushing into the standard. Most e-shop systems have the following basic software components:
- Shop database with product information
- Administration Database
- Presentation system
- Recommendation Engine
- Payment Gateway (processing of the payment process)
- Other functionalities (tools)
- Web Tracking System
Increasingly, e-shops are being equipped with live support systems to reduce bounce rates or to support advice and sales. In addition to the target group orientation of individual software providers, shop systems also differ in the technology used. A distinction is made between web server-based applications and those that first generate locally static pages, which are then loaded onto the web server and provide the shopping cart function via the browser with the help of JavaScript.
An additional variant of an online shop is the possibility of initially transferring the operation to a provider. Comparable to large shopping centres, where shops are rented from individual operators who then use the existing infrastructure, this type of offer is referred to as the ‘shopping mall concept’. Each individual shop operator receives his or her own online shop system, which is linked to a software source in the background. This has the great advantage of meeting the ever-increasing demands on software functions through this source-sharing principle.
