Electronic commerce: structures and issues

Electronic commerce (E-commerce) is sharing business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks. Traditional E-commerce, conducted with the use of information technologies centering on electronic data interchange (EDI) over proprietary value-added networks, is rapidly moving to the Internet. The Internet's World Wide Web has become the prime driver of contemporary E-commerce. This paper presents a hierarchical framework of E-commerce, consisting of three meta-levels: infrastructure, services, and products and structures, which, in turn, consist of seven functional levels. These levels of E-commerce development, as well as of analysis, range from the wide-area telecommunications infrastructure to electronic marketplaces and electronic hierarchies enabled by E-commerce. Several nodal problems are discussed that will define future development in E-commerce, including integrating electronic payment into the buying process, building a consumer marketplace, the governance of electronic business, and the new intermediation. The paper also introduces the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, which will provide an integrated view of the new E-commerce.