Ecommerce or E-commerce: What is This and How to Spell Correctly

Julia Ventskovska
2 min readFeb 1, 2022

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Electronic commerce or e-commerce is purchase and sale of goods or services online.

Digitalization development has opened the ways to create new business models and modernization of dated processes. According to the eMarketer forecast, the Internet purchases share will reach 22% of the market by 2024.

There are several options of the electronic commerce definition spelling:

  • ecommerce
  • e-commerce
  • eCommerce
  • Ecommerce
  • e-Commerce
  • E-commerce
  • ECommerce

The Merriam Webster, Cambridge, and Oxford dictionaries consider only the spelling e-commerce correct.

According to Google Trends and Google Ngram, e-commerce is mostly used as a search request in Google. Notably, the variant with a hyphen is mostly used at the beginning of a sentence or a heading, and the one without hyphen — in the middle.

BigCommerce and Shopify use ecommerce, WordPress — eCommerce. Crazy Egg, an electronic commerce optimization tool, uses the variant e-commerce in processes, ecommerce in the blog and eCommerce in the heading of a blog archive.

In Facebook, one can find combinations ecommerce and eCommerce. And Google uses ecommerce in Google Ads Help and e-commerce in Google for Small Businesses.

As you can see, there is no single opinion, you can use the variant you like the most and the one that is most convenient. Therefore, it is up to you to decide on the better variant — the correct one according to the dictionary or the simplified one.

MK:translations

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