To many people, the Electronic Commerce just is one of the parts of Internet, namely shopping on line. Though in 2003 the total sum of on-line shopping reached to 8000 billion dollars, the operation domain of the Electronic Commerce is not confined to on-line shopping but includes many business activities.
    The Electronic Commerce came into being from ten more years ago. Electronic Data Interchange, abbreviated to EDI, was typical Electronic Commerce activity, but it didn’t broadly popularize because of limited user and high cost, etc. Up to recent years, due to network users increasing quickly, plus multimedia and communication technology being matured gradually, on-line business activity became evident day by day, the word Electronic Commerce was focused on by people with a new signification.
    In the Electronic Commerce, the user could input his willing of supply or demand into the Electronic Commerce internet according to some format to choose kinds of on-line deal terms. The Electronic Commerce includes: commercial information interchange, service of before selling and after selling—provide the details of production and service, provide technological manual of using production, answer the suggestion of consumer—, advertisement, distribution, electronic payment (electronic bankroll accounts transferring, credit card, electronic check, electronic cash), transportation (including dispatch management and transportation tracking of material commodity, and the actual distribution of the production, transmitted by electronic method), building up virtual corporation, and so on.
     There are several common definitions of the Electronic Commerce as follows, and they will help you understand the Electronic Commerce more comprehensively:
     (1) By electronic mode, the Electronic Commerce prosecutes the harmony of material and personnel process on the base of network to realize the commutative activity of the business.
     (2) By data communication, the Electronic Commerce carries through the deal of the commodity and the service along with the transfers of the capital. It also includes all the functions which are carried out by utilizing the E-mail, the EDI, the file transmission, the fax, the videoconference and the telenet between the corporations and the inner of the corporation such as the function of the marketing, the function of finance balance, the function of selling, the function of the commerce negotiation, and so on.
　 (3) America government pointed out in ”Global Electronic Commerce Compendium” that the Electronic Commerce means all sorts of business activities prosecuted through the Internet, and includes the advertisement, the deal, the payment, the service, etc. Global Electronic Commerce will cover all the countries in the word.
     (4) The IBM Corporation brought forward a formula about the Electronic Commerce, namely the Electronic Commerce = Web + IT. What it emphasizes is the commercialization application under the circumstance of network calculation, and is the application through combining the purchaser, the bargainor, the manufacturer with their cooperative partners in Internet, Intranet and Extranet.
     (5) The HP Corporation brings forward that the Electronic Commerce is the E-world which crosses the time domain and the space domain regarding modern expanded enterprises as the basic configuration of information technology; namely E-World, EW(Electronic World)=EC(Electronic Commerce)+EB(Electronic Business)+EC(Electronic Consumer). The domain of HP Corporation’s Electronic Commerce includes all the possible commerce partners, namely the users, the providers and transporters of the commodity and the service, the bank insurance companies, and all other beneficiaries of exterior information sources.
     In a word, the Electronic Commerce is the electronic deal, mainly points the on-line deal activity by utilizing the communication methods provided by the Web, and includes in buying or selling productions and the services by Internet. The production could be incarnate, such as automobile, television, etc, also could be digital, like news, video, software, and so on. In addition, it also could provide kinds of services, such as arranging the travel and telenet-education. The Electronic Commerce isn’t only confined to deal on line, but affects the manners of the commerce activities from all kinds of aspects from manufacturing to consuming. As for the consumer, searching, purchasing production and the service manner has been improved greatly.