This article is about the business concept. For other uses, see Commerce (disambiguation). This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2007) Commerce is the exchange of goods and services from the point of production to the point of consumption to satisfy human wants. It comprises the trading of something of economic value such as goods, services, information, or money between two or more entities. Commerce functions as the central mechanism which drives capitalism and certain other economic systems (but compare command economy, for example). Commercialization or commercialisation consists of the process of transforming something into a product, service or activity which one may then use in commerce. Commerce involves trade and aids to trade which help in the exchange of goods and services.

While "business" refers to the value-creating activities of an organization for profit, commerce means the whole system of an economy that constitutes an environment for business. The system includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural, and technological systems that are in operation in any country. Thus, commerce is a system or an environment that affects the business prospects of an economy or a nation-state. We can also define it as a second component of business which includes all activities, functions and institutions involved in transferring goods from producers to consumers. Contents 1 Word usage 2 History 3 See also 4 References // Word usage

Commerce primarily expresses the fairly abstract notions of buying and selling, whereas trade may refer to the exchange of a specific class of goods ("the sugar trade", for example), or to a specific act of exchange (as in "a trade on the stock-exchange"). Business can refer to an organization set up for the purpose of engaging in manufacturing or exchange, as well as serving as a loose synonym of the abstract collective "commerce and industry". History Cherry peddler in Bucharest, around 1869.

Some commentators trace the origins of commerce to the very start of communication in prehistoric times. Apart from traditional self-sufficiency, trading became a principal facility of prehistoric people, who bartered what they had for goods and services from each other. Historian Peter Watson dates the history of long-distance commerce from circa 150,000 years ago. 1 In historic times, the introduction of currency as a standardized money facilitated a wider exchange of goods and services. Numismatists have collections of these monetary tokens, which include coins from some Ancient World large-scale societies, although initial usage involved unmarked lumps of precious metal. 2 The circulation of a standardized currency provides the major disadvantage to commerce of overcoming the "double coincidence of wants" necessary for barter trades to occur. For example, if a man who makes pots for a living needs a new house, he may wish to hire someone to build it for him. But he cannot make an equivalent number of pots to equal this service done for him, because even if the builder could build the house, the builder might not want the pots. Currency solved this problem by allowing a society as a whole to assign values and thus to collect goods and services effectively and to store them for later use, or to split them among several providers.

Today[update] commerce includes a complex system of companies that try to maximize their profits by offering products and services to the market (which consists both of individuals and other companies) at the lowest production cost. A system of international trade has helped to develop the world economy but, in combination with bileral or multilateral agreements to lower tariffs or to achieve free trade, has sometimes harmed third-world markets for local products (See Globalization). See also Business and economics portal Advertising Agriculture Business Capitalism Commercial law Distribution (business) Wholesale Retailing Cargo Eco commerce Economy Electronic commerce Fair Finance Fishery Harvest Industry Laissez-faire Manufacturing Marketing Marketplace Mass production Merchandising Trade References ^ Watson, Peter (2005). Ideas : A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-621064-X.  Introduction. ^ Gold served especially commonly as a form of early money, as described in "Origins of Money and of Banking" Davies, Glyn (2002). Ideas : A history of money from ancient times to the present day. University of Wales Press. ISBN 0-7083-1717-0.