Ecommerce

How to spell ecommerce

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce ecommerce

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ecommerce mean?

1. nounThe buying and selling of goods and services over the internet.

Ecommerce in a sentence

• The company shifted most of its sales to ecommerce during the pandemic.

• A reliable payment gateway is essential for any ecommerce platform.

Where does ecommerce come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern compound that joins the productive prefix e-, short for 'electronic', to the much older word commerce. Commerce itself reaches back to the Latin commercium, meaning 'trade' or 'trafficking', which was built from com- 'together' and merx, with the stem merc-, meaning 'merchandise' or 'goods for sale'; the same Latin merc- root sits inside 'merchant', 'merchandise', and 'mercenary'. Commerce entered English in the late 1500s by way of French, carrying its sense of buying and selling on a large scale. The e- prefix exploded into general use in the 1990s alongside 'email' and 'e-learning' to mark anything conducted over the internet, and the blend 'electronic commerce' was quickly shortened. The spelling trap is twofold: the doubled m inherited from commercium, and the modern uncertainty over whether to keep a hyphen, since 'e-commerce' and the now common closed form 'ecommerce' both circulate.

How the word is built

• e- (short for electronic)
• commerce (trade, from Latin commercium)