E-commerce and e-tailers

E-commerce is the buying and selling of goods or services online. It is the activity itself: a customer orders and pays through a website, and the seller receives the order electronically.

An e-tailer is a retailer that sells goods or services to consumers online. The e-tailer is the business doing the selling, while e-commerce is the activity it carries out. The terms are not interchangeable: every e-tailer uses e-commerce, but e-commerce also covers other online buying and selling, such as a producer taking orders through its own website.

Online-only or both

An e-tailer may trade only online, with no customer-facing shop, or it may also have physical shops. A business with both can let customers order online and collect from a shop, or browse in a shop and buy later on its website.

For example, Puzzlebox Games sells jigsaws only through its website. It is an e-tailer, and each sale is e-commerce. A garden centre called Greenrow has two shops and a website where customers can order plants for delivery. Greenrow is still an e-tailer for those online sales, even though it also has physical shops.

So Greenrow's website orders are e-commerce carried out by an e-tailer, while its shop sales are retail but not e-commerce. Selling online is a method of distribution a business can add alongside its shops, not a label that replaces them.