One of the main barriers in pursuing advanced research in the fields related to e-commerce and e-marketing is the ambiguous way of dealing with the concept and definition of E-Marketing. The majority of researchers within the field misuse the term E-Marketing for E-business, E-Commerce and Internet Marketing as the synonym which is incorrect since these terms have different connotations (Eid & El-Gohary, 2011). For instance, E-Marketing is wider in scope than Internet Marketing (IM) since it refers not only to digital media such as the Web, e-mail and wireless media, Intranets, Extranets and mobile phones but also includes electronic customer relationship management systems and the management of digital customer data, etc. In contrast with that, E-commerce and E-business have a wider and broader scope than E-Marketing.
It is difficult to find an accepted definition of E-Commerce (Duffy & Dale, 2002), since its definitions vary according to interpretation and use. For example Kim and Moon, 1998 define Electronic Commerce (EC) as: “The delivery of information, products and services, or payments via telephone lines, computer networks or any other electronic means” (Kim & Moon, 1998). Baourakis defines it as: “The trading of goods and information through the Internet”(Baourakis, Kourgiantakis, & Migdalas, 2002) . On the other hand, Chaffey (2007) interpret E-Commerce as a means to exchange information: “All electronically mediated information exchanges between an organization and its external stakeholders”(Chaffey, 2006). In addition, according to some scholars, E Commerce can take a variety of forms which include electronic data exchange (EDI), mobile telephone, direct links-up with suppliers, Internet, Intranet, Extranet, electronic catalogue ordering, and e-mail (Quayle, 2002).
E-Business as a term is broader than E-Commerce since it does not refer only to buying and selling (as in E-Commerce) but also refers to servicing customers and collaborating with business partners. This is in line with the roots of the concept of E-Business (Chesher, Kaura, & Linton, 2003).
Based on the various definitions for E-Commerce and E-Business, mentioned above, the concept of E-Business goes beyond the narrow understanding associated with the term E-Commerce. Within this context, E-Commerce characteristically relates to the process of buying and selling products, services and information through the use of the Internet and/or computer networks (Chaffey, 2007; Lesjak and Vehovar, 2005; Greenstein and Feinman, 2000 and Turban et al., 2004). Moreover, according to Rodgers (Rodgers, Yen, & Chou, 2002), E-Commerce principally focuses on the organisation customers while E-Business expands the connectivity of the organisation to include not only its customers but also the organisation suppliers, employees and business partners.
Based on the above discussion, it is clear that E-Business, E-Marketing, E-Commerce and Internet Marketing are not equivalents or a different wording for the same meaning as observed in the literature, where there is a blurring of the distinction between the terms. These differences and relationship can be illustrated in figure bellow.
