Ecommerce: A Science In and of Itself?

Ecommerce, or Electronic Commerce, has as big of a cult following as it does corporate intrigue. With business deeply-rooted in traditional ways, rapid expansion and adaptation to E-marketing methods such as PPC (Pay-per-Click) and PPI (Pay-per-Impression) advertising are new and shiny, but nevertheless confusing.

Is Ecommerce in its current incarnation a future science within a science? Many economists are willing to bet that it is.

“Classical economics—macro and micro—are what history is to political science,” says Brenda Fisher, a part-time teacher at Edmonds Community College, “It’s significant, but nevertheless ultimately retrofitted and replaced by the newer science, which is more adaptive and less ‘dusty’.”

E-marketing specialists specifically deal with running successful campaigns to gain and retain customers on any E-business website. While some business like Amazon.com exclusively sell online, there are other business who are not comfortable transitioning to such a radical model. While many of them offer online features such as instant quotes, insurance companies are an example of a type of business that has not yet fully transitioned to the web as a medium. This is largely due in part to a “human” element in the business, which is lost in the medium of text and e-mailing.

“It seems so emotionless, yet there’s actually a lot of potential for human emotion to play its part,” notes Fisher, “Corporations like Cisco are working to ensure that human emotion, body language, and intuition play important roles in E-business in the future.”

With the future landscape of online business anything but stable and predictable, Ecommerce will remain an integrated science. Let us hope those SEO companies stay around as long as Google does.