Q.What is meant by E-Commerce?

True — e-business lets you operate worldwide across many fields.

E-business means conducting business activities — buying, selling, servicing customers and dealing with partners — electronically over the internet. Because the internet has a global reach and is available round the clock, e-business is free from the limits of physical location, distance and time. A business can therefore serve customers anywhere in the world, and it can operate in a wide range of fields such as retailing, banking, education, entertainment and services.

This global, borderless reach is one of the major advantages of e-business, so the statement is true.

The mismatched pair is (c) B2G - Alibaba, because Alibaba is a business-to-business (B2B) platform, not a business-to-government (B2G) one.

In the emerging service business chapter of the Tamil Nadu HSC Commerce syllabus, e-commerce is classified by the parties involved, with standard example sites:

• C2B (Consumer to Business) – Monster.com, where individuals offer services/profiles to businesses. Correctly matched, so (a) is right.
• C2C (Consumer to Consumer) – OLX, where consumers buy and sell to one another. Correctly matched, so (d) is right.
• B2B (Business to Business) – Alibaba is the well-known example, where one business trades with another. The paper pairs Alibaba with B2G (Business to Government), which is wrong.

Since Alibaba belongs to the B2B model and not to B2G, the pair "B2G - Alibaba" is the mismatched one.

During online shopping, selected items are placed in the shopping cart before checkout.

In e-business/online shopping, a shopping cart is a software feature on a shopping website that acts like a virtual basket or trolley.

How it works:

• As the customer browses, he adds the products he wants to buy into the shopping cart.
• The cart holds these items temporarily and shows their quantity and total price.
• The customer can review, add or remove items before finalising the purchase.
• After confirming, the customer proceeds to checkout and makes payment.

This is the online equivalent of a trolley/basket used in a physical store, making it a convenient stage before final buying.

The correct sequence in online buying is Registration, Placing an order, Cash on delivery.

The steps in online shopping (e-buying) follow this order:

1. Registration – The customer first creates an account on the shopping website by giving basic details.
2. Placing an order – The customer selects products, adds them to the cart and confirms the order.
3. Cash on delivery – Finally, payment is made; in the cash-on-delivery mode the customer pays when the product is delivered.

Registration is the entry step, ordering follows, and payment/delivery is the concluding step.

The answer is option (c) Wholesaler to Retailer (W2R), which is not a recognised e-commerce model.

E-commerce is classified into domains/models according to the type of parties involved in the online transaction. The standard models are:

• B2B — Business to Business
• B2C — Business to Consumer (Customer)
• C2C — Consumer to Consumer
• C2B — Consumer to Business

There is no standard model called Wholesaler to Retailer (W2R); it is not part of the recognised classification of e-commerce domains. Hence it is the odd one out.

The correct answer is (a) E-Commerce. E-commerce means conducting the buying and selling of goods and services electronically over a network like the internet.

In the Tamil Nadu HSC Commerce syllabus, emerging service businesses include electronic trade:

• E-commerce (electronic commerce) specifically means buying and selling of goods and services, and the transfer of money and data, through an electronic network — typically the internet. This is precisely what the question describes.

• Internet is only the network or medium that makes e-commerce possible — it is not itself the act of buying and selling.

• A website is a location on the internet where information or a store is hosted — again just a tool, not the trading activity.

• Trade in general covers the buying and selling of goods, but the qualifier "through an electronic network" makes the specific and correct term e-commerce.