What is E-commerce?
Also called: Ecommerce, Online store
The short answer
E-commerce is buying and selling online: a website that shows products, takes orders and payments, and hands orders to fulfilment.
What people say: “selling online”, “an online shop”.
E-commerce, explained
Every store needs the same core: product pages, a cart, a secure checkout, payment processing, order emails, and inventory and shipping rules.
The choice is between a hosted platform (fast, monthly fees, shared themes) and a custom storefront (unique, fast, owned) that uses a payment provider's hosted checkout.
Questions people ask about E-commerce
What is E-commerce?
E-commerce is buying and selling online: a website that shows products, takes orders and payments, and hands orders to fulfilment.
How much does it cost to build an online store?
From a monthly platform plan with a theme to five figures for custom agency builds; productised custom stores sit in between.
Do I need Shopify to sell online?
No. A custom storefront can take payments through a hosted checkout directly, without a store platform.
Related terms
Checkout is the sequence where a shopper enters shipping and payment details and places an order; it is where most online sales are won or lost.
Payment gatewayA payment gateway securely passes card and wallet payments from a website to the banks and card networks, and reports whether each payment succeeded.
ShopifyShopify is a hosted e-commerce platform that runs online stores: products, checkout, payments, inventory and themes, paid for monthly plus transaction and app fees.
Headless commerceHeadless commerce separates an online store's front-end from its commerce engine, so products and checkout run on a platform while the storefront is fully custom.
Product pageA product page is the page for one product, with images, price, options, description and the add-to-cart button, where the buying decision happens.
Part of the Web Encyclopedia by Apex Flow Digital. Definitions are general knowledge, kept current, with no invented statistics.