Electronic commerce encompasses the entire online process of developing, marketing, selling, delivering, servicing and paying for products and services. The internet and related technologies together with corporate intranets, extranets and ecommerce portals serve as the business and technology platform for ecommerce marketplaces for consumers and businesses in the basic categories of B2C, B2B and C2C. The essential components or processes of ecommerce application are – access control and security, personalizing and profiling, search management, content management, catalog management, payment systems, workflow management, event notification, collaboration and trading.

Electronic business is much broader in scope, going beyond transaction processing to signify the use of internet, telecommunication and the related technologies, to enable any type of business activity. E-business systems use the information and communication technologies to support ecommerce, communications and collaboration, and web-enabled business processes both within the enterprise and with its customers and business partners. Given the cross functional nature of business, e-business is all about developing and implementing integrated cross functional enterprise systems that cross the boundaries of traditional business systems. The major cross-functional enterprise applications are integrated considering their inter-relationships. The resulting e-business architecture enables accomplishing fundamental business processes in concert with a company’s customer, supplier, partner, employee and other stake holders.
The major cross functional systems are –
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Partner Relationship Management (PRM ), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Knowledge Management (KM).