Overview
Tele-Commerce is any commerce over the phone and is also known as the third wave of e-commerce, which means any form of buying and selling of products or services over telephones, such as the landline phones and mobile phones. Electronic commerce, or e-commerce, is now entering what can be described as a third or mature wave. This wave is characterized by the international nature in which e-commerce is being conducted and the reliance on revenue models as opposed to ‘good internet ideas’. The ‘dot-com’ bubble that burst at the end of the late 1990s has led to a revision of the approaches to establishing e-commerce initiatives. Whilst the first wave of e-commerce was dominated by US businesses and was primarily in English The second wave saw e-commerce shoppers interacting with websites in their own languages It’s now time to give way to the third wave, i.e. – Tele-commerce, where transactions will be conducted over the phone using landline or mobile phones. The term was first coined in 2009 by atom technologies, an Indian company in the electronic payment domain, having completed transactions over Rs. 1000 crores, which includes transactions on IVR and mobile payments.
Contents
Why coin a new term
Transactions that were conducted over the phone were often divided into two different areas, i.e. IVR based and transactions conducted over the mobile phones using mobile payment applications (m-commerce). While both the modes of commerce were primarily done using phones, hence the need for a new category called Tele-commerce.