Glossary E-Commerce

All technical terms of the article The History of E-Commerce in alphabetical order. The number at the end names the section in which the term is introduced.

1

• 1-Click – Purchase with a single click for customers whose address and payment data are stored; US patent of Amazon (1999–2017), not granted in Europe. 4

A

• Agentic commerce – Trade in which an AI agent buys on the customer’s behalf, via protocols such as ACP (OpenAI, Stripe), AP2 and UCP (Google) and the schemes of Visa and Mastercard (2025); in 2026 still an experiment, not everyday life. 8
• AI agent – Program consisting of a language model and tools that carries out multi-step tasks on a person’s behalf, when shopping searching, comparing, ordering and paying; Rufus (2024), ChatGPT Instant Checkout (2025), Comet. 8

B

• B2B – Business-to-business, trade between companies; electronic since EDI, on the web since Dell and Cisco (1996); larger by sales than trade with consumers. 3
• B2C – Business-to-consumer, selling by companies to consumers, the subject of this article. 3
• Barcode – Stripe code on the goods that a scanner reads; Universal Product Code, first sale on 26 June 1974 in Troy, Ohio; prerequisite for warehouse, till and logistics with millions of articles. 1
• Bildschirmtext – Btx, the videotex of the German Bundespost, launched on 1 September 1983, around 320,000 subscribers in 1992, merged into T-Online in 1995, switched off at the end of 2001; Otto and Quelle offered their catalogues through it. 2
• Button rule – Rule since 1 August 2012 that the button for ordering must say “zahlungspflichtig bestellen” (order with obligation to pay) and that price, shipping costs and contract term must stand immediately above it; supplemented since 19 June 2026 by the withdrawal button. 6
• Buy on invoice – The customer receives the goods, examines them and only then pays; introduced by Otto after 1950, to this day, next to PayPal, the most common payment method in German online retail, offered as a service by Klarna since 2005. 1

C

• Cash on delivery – Payment at the front door: the postman collects the amount and hands over the consignment; the payment route of mail order before credit card and payment service. 1
• Commission – Share of the selling price that the marketplace takes from the third-party seller, usually eight to fifteen per cent; plus fees for storage, shipping and advertising. 5
• Cookie – Small note that a server deposits in the browser and that the browser sends along with every further request so that the server recognises the user again; invented in 1994 by Lou Montulli at Netscape for a shopping cart. 3
• Credit card – Payment card for which a bank vouches on the holder’s behalf and whose number suffices to pay from a distance; Diners Club (1950), BankAmericard (1958, later Visa); the means of payment of early online retail. 1

D

• Digital goods – Music, films, games, software and subscriptions that are delivered without a parcel and cost nothing to copy; iTunes Store (2003), Steam (2003), App Store (2008); their bottleneck is rights and the platform’s share, not delivery. 6
• Digital Markets Act – EU Regulation 2022/1925, which forbids gatekeepers to favour their own offers and to use the data of their third-party sellers against them; obligations since March 2024. 7
• Digital Services Act – EU Regulation 2022/2065, fully applicable since 17 February 2024: platforms must check traders, remove illegal goods, explain recommendations and examine risks; fines up to six per cent of worldwide turnover, 200 million euros against Temu (2026). 7
• Direct-to-consumer – D2C, a brand selling to its customers without retailers and marketplace, usually through its own store and advertising on social networks; Warby Parker (2010), Dollar Shave Club (2011); more expensive since Apple’s tracking restriction (2021). 7

E

• E-commerce – Buying and selling goods and services in which order and usually payment run over a data network and no person on the seller’s side takes the order; in 2025 around a fifth of retail worldwide. Introduction
• Electronic Data Interchange – EDI, exchange of order, delivery note and invoice as standardised records between the computers of two companies; since 1968 (TDCC), standard ANSI X12 (1979); electronic trade between businesses before the web. 1
• Escrow payment – The buyer pays an intermediary, the seller ships, the buyer confirms receipt, only then does the seller get the money; Alipay (2004) solved the trust problem of Chinese online retail with it. 5

F

• Fulfilment – Storage, packing, shipping and returns as a service for outside merchants; Fulfillment by Amazon (2006) turned Amazon from a store into infrastructure. 5

G

• Gatekeeper – Under the Digital Markets Act: company that stands between businesses and consumers and without which no merchant can manage; Amazon designated since September 2023. 7

L

• Last mile – Way from the last warehouse to the front door, the most expensive part of the supply chain; Packstation (2001), Amazon’s own drivers, quick commerce (2020). 6
• Long tail – Chris Anderson’s observation (2004) that a store without shelf limits makes a large part of its sales from millions of rarely bought articles together. 5

M

• Mail order – Selling from a printed catalogue with ordering by letter or telephone and delivery by post; founded by Pryce-Jones (1861), Montgomery Ward (1872) and Sears (1888), in Germany Mey & Edlich (1886), Quelle (1927), Otto and Neckermann (1950). 1
• Membership – Flat fee that makes shipping costs invisible and binds the customer to one store; Amazon Prime (2005, 79 dollars a year for two-day shipping) as the model. 5
• Mobile commerce – Shopping via the mobile phone, since iPhone (2007) and App Store (2008); demands pages for small screens, checkouts without a keyboard and apps, and brought the store to every place. 6

O

• Online marketplace – Site on which not the operator sells but outside sellers and buyers find each other and the operator takes a fee; eBay (1995) was the first, Taobao (2003) and Amazon Marketplace (2000) the largest. 3
• Online service – Closed network for home computers with news, mail, forums and a department store for a monthly fee: CompuServe (Electronic Mall 1984), Prodigy (1988), America Online; every merchant had to join every service separately. 2
• Online shop – Store on the web: catalogue pages from a database, shopping cart, checkout with encrypted transfer of address and payment data, confirmation by email; in this form since 1994/95. 3

P

• Payment service – Intermediary that holds the buyer’s card or account data and passes on only the money to the merchant, so that the buyer need not entrust his data to every store; PayPal (1999), Alipay (2004), Klarna (2005), Apple Pay (2014). 4
• Platform model – Business in which the operator rents customers, software, warehouses and trust to outside merchants and earns from each of their sales without owning the goods; Amazon Marketplace since 2000. 5
• Price comparison – Site that lists the same product at many merchants by price; idealo (2000), Froogle (2002, later Google Shopping); made margins thin and was the subject of the EU fine against Google (2017). 5

Q

• QR code – Square barcode that any phone camera can read; in China since 2011 (Alipay) and 2013 (WeChat Pay) the means of payment for everything, from the street vendor to the rent. 6
• Quick commerce – Delivery within minutes from small warehouses in residential districts; Gorillas and Flink (2020), Getir; largely collapsed after the pandemic. 7

R

• Return – Goods sent back that are checked, refurbished and resold or destroyed; in fashion about half of sales; consequence of the right of withdrawal and free returns. 6
• Right of withdrawal – Consumer’s right to cancel a distance contract without giving reasons and send the goods back; Directive 97/7/EC, in Germany since 30 June 2000 (two weeks), since 13 June 2014 fourteen days throughout the Union. 4

S

• Search advertising – Buying visibility next to the search results, paid per click in an auction; Google AdWords (2000); replaces for the store on the net the location on the high street. 5
• Shop system – Finished software with which a merchant puts a store on the net without programmers of his own: catalogue, shopping cart, checkout, administration; Intershop (1995), Magento (2008), WooCommerce (2011), as rented software Shopify (2006). 3
• Shopping cart – List of the selected goods that persists across pages until the customer goes to the checkout; needs cookies or a login because the web forgets everything between two pages. 3
• Social commerce – Selling in the stream of entertainment, in videos and livestreams with purchase in the app; in China since 2016, in the West with TikTok Shop (USA 2023). 7
• SSL – Secure Sockets Layer, Netscape’s procedure (1995) in which browser and server encrypt everything they exchange and the server identifies itself with a certificate; TLS since 1999; the padlock in the address bar. 3

T

• Teleshopping – Selling from the television programme with ordering by telephone; Home Shopping Network (1982/1985), QVC (1986), in Germany H.O.T. (1995) and QVC (1996). 1
• Third-party seller – Merchant who sells on someone else’s marketplace; on Amazon since 2015 more than half of the items sold, in 2025 61 per cent. 5
• Trust mark – Sign from an auditor that a store handles legal notice, data protection, withdrawal and payment correctly, usually with an insurance for the buyer; Trusted Shops (Cologne, 1999). 4

U

• UN/EDIFACT – World standard of the United Nations for EDI messages (ISO 9735, 1988), by which orders, customs declarations and freight documents are exchanged between companies to this day. 2

V

• Videotex – Text pages with crude graphics that a television or terminal fetches from a central computer over the telephone line; closed networks of one operator such as Prestel (1979), Minitel (1982) and Bildschirmtext (1983). 2