E-business occurs when a company has established critical business procedures and activities to support e-commerce transactions. Using this definition, e-commerce is part of e-business-a company needs e-commerce to implement e-business. Utilizing e-commerce, however, does not mean that a company has transformed into an e-business. E-business is implemented only when a company changes its internal procedures to take advantage of the e-commerce technologies.

Interest in the evolution ("e-volution") of e-commerce into e-business is a growth field. With the early November announcement that GM and Ford were forming online marketplaces for their suppliers, they placed themselves at the center of new e-business ecosystems that will transform their entire way of doing business. Many firms are increasingly discovering opportunities to move away from simply selling products on the Internet to being able to reinvent their conventional supply chains (as in the auto makers' case) and to being able to offer custom-built products (as Dell Computers does now).