E-commerce hosting is a business in which a company provides other companies whatever they need to sell their products and services on the World Wide Web - including a Web server to serve a company's pages, possibly the Web site design (including catalog pages), and the special capabilities needed to accept, process, and confirm sales orders.
e-commerce hosting usually includes providing templates for building virtual storefronts or online catalogs, providing software for customized electronic "shopping carts," taking and filling customer orders, arranging for secure credit-card purchasing, and providing tools for tracking and managing inventory.

Here's how it typically works:

A company contracts with an e-commerce hosting provider to purchase hosting space on its computer server. This space usually is billed monthly, along with any leasing of computer software for processing online orders. The computer server may be shared with other clients, or in the case of companies expecting a substantial amount of traffic, may be dedicated exclusively to one client.

To ensure secure payment processes, these providers also usually assist with setting up Internet merchant accounts, which are bank accounts established to process Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover credit-card transactions. Some hosting providers will register a company's domain name as part of the package.

E-commerce hosting firms customarily manage all the technical aspects of creating and maintaining a commercial Web site for its customers. For smaller companies, this is often more effective and cost-efficient than setting up and manageing their own e-commerce site themselves since they are essentially sharing the cost of expensive equipment and Internet connections with other companies.

An e-commerce hosting provider may also provide services other than managing online transactions, including EDI, the gathering of demographic or other information (usually for marketing purposes), or transactions between businesses (business-to-business e-commerce).


E-commerce (electronic commerce or EC) is the buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet, especially the World Wide Web. In practice, this term and a newer term, e-business, are often used interchangably. For online retail selling, the term e-tailing is sometimes used.

E-commerce can be divided into:

E-tailing or "virtual storefronts" on Web sites with online catalogs, sometimes gathered into a "virtual mall"
The gathering and use of demographic data through Web contacts
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), the business-to-business exchange of data
e-mail and fax and their use as media for reaching prospects and established customers (for example, with newsletters)
Business-to-business buying and selling
The security of business transactions

E-tailing or The Virtual Storefront and the Virtual Mall
As a place for direct retail shopping, with its 24-hour availability, a global reach, the ability to interact and provide custom information and ordering, and multimedia prospects, the Web is rapidly becoming a multibillion dollar source of revenue for the world's businesses. A number of businesses already report considerable success. As early as the middle of 1997, Dell Computers reported orders of a million dollars a day. By early 1999, projected e-commerce revenues for business were in the billions of dollars and the stocks of companies deemed most adept at e-commerce were skyrocketing. Although many so-called dotcom retailers disappeared in the economic shakeout of 2000, Web retailing at sites such as Amazon.com, CDNow.com, and CompudataOnline.com continues to grow.

Market Research
In early 1999, it was widely recognized that because of the interactive nature of the Internet, companies could gather data about prospects and customers in unprecedented amounts -through site registration, questionnaires, and as part of taking orders. The issue of whether data was being collected with the knowledge and permission of market subjects had been raised. (Microsoft referred to its policy of data collection as "profiling" and a proposed standard has been developed that allows Internet users to decide who can have what personal information.)

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
EDI is the exchange of business data using an understood data format. It predates today's Internet. EDI involves data exchange among parties that know each other well and make arrangements for one-to-one (or point-to-point) connection, usually dial-up. EDI is expected to be replaced by one or more standard XML formats, such as ebXML.

E-Mail, Fax, and Internet Telephony
E-commerce is also conducted through the more limited electronic forms of communication called e-mail, facsimile or fax, and the emerging use of telephone calls over the Internet. Most of this is business-to-business, with some companies attempting to use e-mail and fax for unsolicited ads (usually viewed as online junk mail or spam) to consumers and other business prospects. An increasing number of business Web sites offer e-mail newsletters for subscribers. A new trend is opt-in e-mail in which Web users voluntarily sign up to receive e-mail, usually sponsored or containing ads, about product categories or other subjects they are interested in.

Business-to-Business Buying and Selling
Thousands of companies that sell products to other companies have discovered that the Web provides not only a 24-hour-a-day showcase for their products but a quick way to reach the right people in a company for more information.
The Security of Business Transactions
Security includes authenticating business transactors, controlling access to resources such as Web pages for registered or selected users, encrypting communications, and, in general, ensuring the privacy and effectiveness of transactions. Among the most widely-used security technologies is the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is built into both of the leading Web browsers.

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