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.

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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.

Video: E-commerce Websites for Small Businesses

More videos!

In this video, you'll learn how an experienced web services company can help you create a store, accept payments, manage your inventory and secure your transactions.

This is a good introductory / explanatory video, whereas the previous video was a good promotional video. I think that for a product that is as involved as ours, it helps to have a visual explanation and I like the cut out, white-board style used here. It's very reminiscent of the Common Craft show, which I'm a big fan of from their RSS in Plain English video.

Video: Is an E-commerce Website Right For You?

I have spoken by phone, private message and email with this client many times, but it is nice to be able to put a face to with the name.

The founder of a successful online store Jerry Gonto of MartiniArt.com explains why you don't need a technical background to create an e-commerce website with everything you need to succeed.

Record Breaking Credit Card Breach at Heartland Payment Systems

As a consumer, this is a little disheartening.

The Washington Post has reported that Heartland Payment Systems, a payment processor that services more than 250,000 businesses, has had more than 100 million transactions compromised via malicious software that was installed on its network; it will likely turn out to be the largest data breach ever reported. The 'good' news is that the criminals were only capturing credit card numbers, the names on the cards, and expiration dates—the info encoded onto the magnetic strip on the card. Because no addresses, SSNs or PINs were stolen, the prospect of full-blown identity theft is pretty small—which must explain why Heartland isn't offering any sort of credit monitoring package as compensation. Instead, their CFO says, We recognize and feel badly about the inconvenience this is going to cause consumers.

But it's even more alarming for me as someone who works in the e-commerce industry. I believe strongly that news like this should be disclosed and full and public investigations must be carried out to prevent these issues. However, for consumers this is a big blow to confidence in e-commerce in general. And that does not bode well for the small business in the long term.

Read more about this breach at The Consumerist.

Using CSS to Format Superscript

Do you find yourself using superscript in your writing often? This would be the "rd" added as a suffix to 3 when you mean third. For example:

3^rd grade - 3^rd base - 3^rd donut

It doesn't come up very often for everyone, but when it does you will want to style it correctly. For most fonts in HTML a superscript element in the middle of a paragraph will cause a minor display issue. This is variably dependent on both the browser and the font used. To see what I'm talking about, see the following screen shot from a recent page on rd.com (Reader's Digest). Pay particular attention to the 2^nd or 3^rd line from the bottom.

It's hard to notice, but the line with the text about the 44^th president is causing a few pixels of extra space between it and the line above. This is throwing the line spacing out of a consistent flow and it distracts the eye. The following code line added to your CSS code settings will prevent this issue.

sup { font-size: .5em; }

Default styles usually make the superscript smaller than the surrounding text, but not always small enough to prevent it from hitting the ceiling in the line above and causing the incorrect line spacing. This code will make sure that it is HALF the size of the paragraph font no matter what you may change it to later.

Some but not all word processing programs will automatically format your text typed as 3rd to display as 3^rd and it's updated as you type. For your web site, you will want to be sure to use superscript, but you will also want to style it correctly for every browser.

More Information

• CSS Creator Subscript and Superscript
• style-sheets.com - SUP - Superscript

Update: I wanted to find out about other tips that are available and I found this option that may be a bit better.

sub, sup { line-height: 0px; }

The inspiration and idea came from Web Matters - CSS superscript spacing, but that page goes into more detail about how the elements are styled by default. Their actual suggestion is to increase the standard line height for the whole page to 1.4em and then set the superscript line height to zero within that element. But this is easier as far as I can tell. YMMV!