Ecommerce

Ecommerce is the buying and selling of goods and services online — the storefront, catalog, cart, checkout, payment, and fulfillment that move a transaction from browse to doorstep. It spans models this glossary treats individually: DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER brands on their own stores, marketplaces aggregating sellers, B2B commerce moving wholesale online, DROP-SHIPPING's inventory-free variant, and the social-and-chat commerce the CONVERSATIONAL entries cover. As a sector it is simply retail's online half — and as a discipline it is a metrics chain anyone can read.

The operating math compresses to a chain: revenue = traffic × CONVERSION RATE × AVERAGE ORDER VALUE × repeat frequency, with CONTRIBUTION MARGIN after product, shipping, payment, and returns deciding whether the revenue was worth having. Every ecommerce growth lever attacks one link — acquisition fills traffic (at the CAC the COHORT-LTV math must support), CRO and CHECKOUT-ABANDONMENT work move conversion, merchandising and bundles lift AOV (the BASKET-SIZE entries), lifecycle and retention drive frequency (the email, SMS, and CRM-RETARGETING playbooks), and operations defend margin (fulfillment promises, returns policy, the CURBSIDE-and-BOPIS bridge to stores). The platform layer (storefront systems, payments, COMPOSABLE-COMMERCE architectures) sets capability ceilings, and the channel layer keeps shifting — marketplaces for capture, social commerce for discovery, retail media monetizing the storefronts themselves. What experience keeps re-teaching: ecommerce businesses die of margin, not revenue (the DTC entry's reckoning generalized), the second purchase is where the economics start working, and operational promises — delivery dates, stock truth, easy returns — convert and retain harder than most creative.

Ecommerce matters as the default context for half this glossary — the metrics chain above is the skeleton its entries hang on. As a strategic matter it now means omnichannel: pure-online and pure-physical are both edge cases, with stores, sites, marketplaces, and chat composing one trade. The discipline is chain-literacy — know which link each initiative moves, price every win in contribution margin, and treat the second purchase as the business model's real start line.

Electronic commerce predates the web — EDI moved B2B orders in the 1970s-80s — but the 1994-95 cohort (Amazon, eBay, the first secure online transactions) founded the consumer sector, and successive waves (mobile, marketplaces, social commerce) moved it from retail's experiment to its default half.

Etymology: source.

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