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As the traditional uses of EDI grow in sophistication, and EDI develops greater market penetration, new and non-traditional aspects of electronic commerce are also emerging. Traditional, high-volume company-to-company document trading represents "structured electronic commerce", while the ad hoc, informational human-to-human exchange of non-business or time-critical information represents "unstructured" electronic commerce.

Structured Electronic Commerce (EC)

Structured EC is the traditional company-to-company model where the primary focus is the purchase, sale and movement of goods, services and business information. Structured EC follows well-defined protocols of business behaviour, established by convention over time to protect the interests of the parties involved. It is characterised by a limited set of stable business relationships and a high volume of traditional business transactions, usually supported by paper or electronic artefacts that are designed to replace paper. Structured EC is usually of a predictable nature, where the initiating event (such as a purchase order) directly drives a standard sequence of process steps or resource requirements, and its conduct generates statistical information that can be used to forecast the demand for a particular item or resource with varying degrees of certainty. Structured EC usually involves well established and rigidly controlled "transaction sets".

Unstructured Electronic Commerce

Unstructured EC, by contrast, focuses primarily on the ad hoc exchange of information, requests for services, or low-volume purchase and sale of goods direct to the end consumer. It is characterised by random demand from an ever-changing assortment of companies or individuals exchanging low volumes of unrelated transactions or requests on an intermittent or one-time basis, usually but not always involving supporting artefacts such as paper forms. Unstructured commerce does not normally follow a particular business protocol, such as Purchase Order/Acknowledgement/Shipping Notice/Invoice, but is often driven by external events or unfolding situational conditions at the time of the transaction, and one transaction can often lead to one or more others, in a decision-tree manner.

Purpose

The main purpose of Electronic Commerce (EC) is therefore to improve customer satisfaction with products and services; allow the organisation (business-business and business-consumer) to provide the product and service faster; allow them to provide the product at a lower cost; and to improve business processes.

Summary

	An end-to-end solution for electronically purchasing goods and services
	Incorporates elements of sourcing, pricing, and payment
	Includes electronic catalogues, on-line ordering, and transmission of payment data

May or may not involve the Internet

Business-to-business electronic commerce is NOT Internet Shopping