The World Wide Web technology enables people around the globe to engage in commercial activities without temporal and spatial boundaries. According to Laudon and Traver [5], there are seven unique features of e-commerce technology including Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. ICEC’06, August 14–16, 2006, Fredericton, Canada. Copyright 2006 ACM 1-59593-392-1.
ubiquity, global reach, universal standards, richness, interactivity, information density and personalization/customization. As noted, e-commerce is available everywhere and anytime. Anyone with a Web-enabled device can hook on to the Internet and conduct commerce electronically. Moreover, e-commerce enables potentially billions of consumers and businesses worldwide to be engaged in business activities. Since e-commerce is being practiced by different users having diverse demographic backgrounds they all define e-commerce from their own perspective. There are indeed many researchers in the area of e-commerce trying to define the meanings of e-commerce. However, as e-commerce is on the fast track of evolution, past definitions of e-commerce may not hold in this new era. The aim of this paper is to provide an extended dynamic and generalized framework for electronic commerce. This framework differs from previous models, whereby it caters the needs for new e-commerce era and provides the flexibility to the user to describe the meaning of e-commerce that suits his background. Moreover, this paper presents the components and their instances to meaningfully define e-commerce. Finally, sample applications of the framework based on different business backgrounds are presented.
Keywords E-commerce, E-commerce model, E-commerce framework, E-Commerce definition
