At the simplest level eCommerce is doing business through electronic rather than traditional media.  It encompasses all manner of commerce, including business-to-business, business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer transactions and involves:

• Electronic marketing research
• Electronic catalogs
• Website management
• Automated negotiation
• Secure electronic payments
• Distributed transaction processing
• Order fulfillment
• Customer satisfaction
• Data mining and analysis

Few fields of business are so intimately tied to technology.   Implementing eCommerce calls for a blend of:

• Networking
• Distributed databases
• Computer security
• Internet programming
• Multimedia
• Web facilities
• Intelligent agents
• Human interface design

Successful introduction of electronic commerce requires an understanding not only of its true costs and benefits, but such issues as:

• Business reengineering
• Change management, including integrating legacy systems with Internet front ends
• Supply chain structures
• Accounting and auditing in electronic businesses
• Changing role of intermediaries
• Nature of money as a medium of exchange
• Rapid business reaction time
• Trends in eCommerce law, policy and regulation
• Future technology

The programs of the Institute for eCommerce involve all of the above topics.