What is ecommerce? Meaning, types and how it works, with real numbers

What is ecommerce

Ecommerce is buying and selling goods or services over the internet, where the customer chooses, pays and gets a confirmation online, without talking to anyone. The word is short for electronic commerce, also written e-commerce or eCommerce.

The ecommerce meaning most people have in mind is an online store, but the term covers three different things:

• The activity: any sale agreed and paid online, whether a sweater, a software subscription or a pallet of spare parts.
• The tool: the online store or app where the order happens, with a catalog, cart, checkout and payment provider.
• The business: everything behind the store that turns orders into profit: stock, shipping, marketing, service and measurement.

A store can look beautiful and still not be a business. Much of this guide is about that gap.

The numbers come from 42.6 thousand orders placed between January and September 2026 in online stores we grow, across several platforms. They are aggregates, never a single store. Amounts are in shekels, tax included, with a dollar equivalent at about 3.7 shekels to the dollar. The lessons apply in any market.

How does ecommerce work? From the first click to the second order

Every online order follows the same path, whatever the product or platform:

1. Discovery. An ad, a search result, a marketplace listing, a creator's post, an email or a friend's link.
2. The product page. Photos, price, delivery time, returns, reviews. The decision is made here, usually on a phone.
3. Cart and checkout. An address, and the full cost including shipping and tax.
4. Payment. A payment provider authorises the card or wallet in seconds. The money arrives later, minus a fee.
5. Confirmation. The store confirms the order, updates stock and issues a receipt or invoice where required.
6. Fulfilment. The order is packed, from the seller's shelf or a third-party warehouse, and a carrier delivers it. Returns travel back the same way.
7. After the order. A delivery update, a review request, a useful email weeks later. The second order starts here.

Two things are easy to miss. The path has to run without people, because, as the numbers below show, many orders arrive while the team sleeps. And it does not end at delivery: when winning a customer costs money, the first order often just covers that cost, and the margin builds on the orders that follow.

Types of ecommerce

The types of ecommerce are usually sorted in two ways: by who sells to whom, and by how the sale is set up. Most businesses fit more than one.

The categories overlap: a D2C brand is also B2C, and may sell on a marketplace and through social posts too. The difference that matters most is ownership. On your own store you own the customer, the data and the price. On a marketplace you rent access to someone else's customers, under their rules.

What an ecommerce business is made of

Behind every store that works sit six parts:

• The store. Product pages, cart and checkout. On a hosted platform such as Shopify, hosting and security are the platform's job.
• The catalog. Products, prices and stock, and the margin on each, which decides what you can spend to sell it.
• Payments. A provider that works in your market, the methods your customers expect, fraud checks and refunds.
• Fulfilment. Storage, packing, carriers and returns, judged against the largest stores your customers use.
• Marketing. Ads, search, social, email and messaging. A store does not bring its own traffic.
• Measurement. Real store revenue against everything you spend. Ad platforms report their own version, often far from what reached the bank.

How to build each part, and in what order, is in how to build an ecommerce website.

What ecommerce looks like in the numbers

This is what 42.6 thousand real orders look like. Each figure is the median across the stores we measured: a typical store, not the biggest.

• The order. The average order was about $95 (₪350), ranging from about $43 to $243 by store, depending mostly on what each sells.
• The basket. 51% of orders held a single item.
• The discount. 51% of orders carried a discount, from a coupon code to an automatic one.
• The clock. 29% of orders arrived between eight in the evening and seven in the morning, local time.
• The customer. 13% of orders came from returning customers, from 3% to 20% depending on the store.

Revenue is not spread evenly either. The median store sold about 230 different products, yet its top product alone brought 6% of item revenue, the top five 25% and the top ten 39%.

An online store is rarely a catalog that sells evenly. It is a few products that carry the revenue, and a basket that often holds just one item.

How ecommerce businesses grow

Ecommerce revenue is four numbers multiplied: how many people visit, what share buy, how much they spend per order, and how often they return. Every growth plan pulls one of these levers.

• Traffic. The trap is judging channels by what ad platforms report about themselves. Judge them by real store revenue against total spend, as explained in real ROAS vs reported ROAS.
• Conversion. Won or lost on the product page and in checkout: clear photos, delivery and returns next to the button, the full price before payment, a checkout that works on a phone at midnight.
• Basket. With about half of orders holding one item, the second item is the most direct room to grow: complementary products, bundles, a free-shipping threshold set from the median order. More in how to increase average order value.
• Repeat. In the median store the second order came about 30 days after the first. That is the window for a post-purchase email or a reorder reminder, and without the customer's email and consent, there is nobody to send it to.

So is ecommerce profitable? It depends on the gap between what a product earns after its cost, shipping, fees and returns, and what it costs to win the order. There is no typical margin, and we will not pretend there is. The data shows where the room often sits: in the basket and the second order, not only in more traffic.

How to start an ecommerce business

1. Start from the product and the customer. What you sell, to whom, at what margin, and why from you.
2. Choose the model. Your own store, a marketplace, or both. Brands that want to own the customer usually start with their own store.
3. Choose the platform. When the store is the business, we build on Shopify, because checkout, hosting and updates are handled for you. When to choose otherwise: Shopify vs WooCommerce.
4. Build around a few hero products, on complete product pages, rather than the whole catalog. Step by step in how to build an ecommerce website.
5. Set up payments, shipping and tax, then place a full test order from a phone.
6. Measure from day one. Analytics, ad pixels, email capture with consent, and real revenue from the first order.
7. Launch small, then add, and review the numbers after the first month.

At Preneuriat we build the store and run the marketing as one team, so the site is built around what the campaigns need. Whoever does the work, the order holds.