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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

E-commerce / eCommerce / E-Commerce - Can We Get Some Consensus, Please?

If you check online for the definition of e-commerce, you will usually get something like the following:

E-commerce
Commerce that is transacted electronically, as over the Internet.

But the frustrating thing is that there is no official consensus within the industry on which exact spelling of this term we are supposed to use. Can we get some consistency here with the name? It is an entire industry in and of itself. I know that it is really in it's infancy as far as industries go and there is a lot tied up in the discussion (trademarks, domain names, claims to fame). But I personally type this word dozens of times a day. Prospective clients looking for our services are typing it into search engines. Can we all (coworkers and competitors alike) pick one of the plethora of options and hang our collective hat on it? I'm sure it hurts our credibility to have so many variations out there floating around.

"E-commerce"

This is my current favorite simply from habitual use. But perhaps it should be abolished based on redundancy and for consistency. The term stands for electronic commerce. For electronic mail, we don't dare use "e-mail" as that just looks silly.

"eCommerce"

This one is nice, but what happens when you have a time where you had to use a capital letter for the first character? "ECommerce"? I don't like that.

"Ecommerce"

For simplicity, this should be the winner. But for some reason I can't quite place, it is wrong too.


I'm open to suggestions and convincing arguments for your favorite. The industry at large will decide some day, but we can certainly discuss the likely choices and steer it to our preference.