In the present information age, e-commerce is the buzzword. It is associated with the
buying and selling of information, products and services via computer networks. It is
a means of transacting business electronically, usually, over the Internet. It is the tool
that leads to ‘enterprise integration’. With the growth of e-commerce, there is a rapid
advancement in the use of e-contracts.1 The business community sees a great potential
in e-commerce. The advances in computer science and information technology offer
an increase in the number of such opportunities. In this direction, amazon.com,
e-bay.com, etc. are the giants in the industry that provide separate e-commerce servers
and are totally dedicated to the development of e-commerce. The advantages of
e-commerce are countless; it reduces paperwork and helps discover the availability of
different products, their prices and quality. A customer from anywhere on the globe
can get updated information about the product and can also place an order within a
few minutes. E-commerce solutions allow a customer to have a wide range of choices,
etc.
E-contract (electronic contract) is the backbone of e-commerce. An electronic contract
is an agreement created and ‘signed’ in an electronic form. Any law for this purpose
shall ensure two main objectives: ensuring that e-contracts suffer no disadvantage in
the commercial markets relative to paper contracts, and that the consumers benefit
from all the legal protection they enjoy when entering into paper contracts. To achieve these twin objectives, most of the nations have adopted different methods in their
domestic laws. Today, there are State Laws that uniquely apply to e-contracts. This
paper discusses the definition, scope, nature, legality and various other issues related
to e-contracts.
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