E-commerce is trade whose sale closes on a screen: the buyer chooses, reads the price, orders and pays there, and the goods arrive afterwards. Kokudankokuya sells perfume that a customer cannot smell before buying, so its pages describe the scent instead. None of those steps is new to a shopkeeper; what changes is that a written page now does the convincing and an order record now holds what was sold.
Where the sale closes: on a screen rather than across a counter
A sale becomes e-commerce at the point where it is concluded, and in e-commerce that point is a screen. The absence of contact is what the statutory definition puts at its centre. Turkey’s law on the regulation of electronic commerce (Elektronik Ticaretin Düzenlenmesi Hakkında Kanun) defines electronic commerce as online economic and commercial activity carried out in an electronic medium without the parties meeting physically. The buyer picks the item, settles the variant, reads what it costs and pays for it there, and the only task left outside the page is getting the goods to the door. Whether a site should be built to conclude sales or only to show them is its own decision, with its own test, and our guide on catalogue versus a shop that closes sales works through it.
Showing a price online is not the same as concluding a sale there. The QR menu built for Çatalca Merkez Kasap puts the shop’s products and their prices on a phone, and the buying still happens across the counter, with the screen showing rather than selling.
Online the events of a sale come apart: the payment is taken today, the parcel arrives afterwards, and a return becomes possible only once the buyer has the goods in front of them. Across a counter they happen together, inside the same minute and the same room, so each one props up the next. In a shop the goods in the hand and the slip in the pocket did that propping. Pulled apart in time, those events cannot hold each other, so each one needs something written down of its own.
An address, a carrier and a window for arrival have to be captured, because nobody is walking out with the goods. Online they survive as fields inside the order and as steps that run after it. A till never asked for any of them. Handover is the part of the sale the screen cannot absorb.
Because the goods are not there to be handled, the buyer reaches a decision from writing about the product instead of from the product. What stands in the counter’s place is a record. A shop never needed one; the customer carried the thing itself out of the door. The record exists so that what the buyer saw stays written down.
Who sells to whom: the types of e-commerce
Naming the type matters because the type decides which steps exist. A site whose work ends with a listing in front of a buyer never grows a basket, a payment step or a path for returns. A shop open to consumers has them all before it opens, because the exchange is meant to finish on the page. Underneath the labels sits a question about who is at the other end, and whether the price depends on the answer.
In a shop open to consumers the catalogue and the price look the same to everyone who loads the page, and a sale can close without the seller ever knowing who the buyer is. A business can equally sell the same goods from a domain it owns. Holding a seller account on a marketplace is not what decides the question either.
KGM SsangYong, under its own name, runs an online sales channel where the brand’s product is presented and sold on the same screen. Kokudankokuya retails perfume and runs its shop on a domain of its own. A retailer’s catalogue gathers goods from several brands, while a brand’s channel carries what the brand itself sells, and the route to a product follows from that. Authorship is what the distinction settles in practice: in a shop of its own, a business decides what the product page says and what the order writes down.
Selling to companies rather than consumers changes who is at the far end, and that trade sits outside this article; a consumer shop never needs to recognise a buyer at all, since the catalogue opens the same way for everyone.
Every shop-floor step has an on-screen counterpart
No step of the order drops out when a shop moves online; the assistant who used to fetch the right box and say the price is replaced by a record written in advance. Behind a counter, fetching, pricing and wrapping could all belong to the same pair of hands, while online they land on separate records and separate screens. Nothing on the page is deciding; it is reading a decision taken earlier. The table sets each step against its replacement: the step, then whoever or whatever performed it in a shop, then what performs it on a screen.
| Order step | Who or what did this in a shop | What takes it over on screen |
|---|---|---|
| Finding the product | Shelf layout and whoever stood behind the counter; the customer asks, the assistant walks them over | A category tree and a search box; another way through the catalogue can be built around how customers actually look for things |
| Examining it | The product itself: picked up, turned over, tried on | A written description and images on the product page; the decision rests on what is written there |
| Choosing a variant and seeing its price | The assistant hands over the version asked for; the price is read off a label | The buyer makes the choice; the screen reads the record behind it and shows the price |
| Paying and getting a document | The till, and the receipt handed across it | Payment taken as the closing step of the flow, and an invoice issued by the system |
| Taking the goods away | The customer carries them out; sale and handover close together | Handover moves later; a stored address and a dispatch step become part of the order |
| Giving the goods back | The customer brings them to the counter with the receipt | The return opens from the order record; because the goods are met at delivery, the step is built into the sale |
Read the middle column against the right-hand one and the point of the table shows: the steps stay put, and the hands change. Where an invoice travels after it is issued is the subject of our article on invoices moving from software into accounting. The invoice row is the clearest case: what used to be passed across the till now issues from the order itself.
Payment sits in the table as the step that closes the flow, and this article leaves it there; where payment belongs in the flow is a question of its own.
Rows do not all appear on every site. Reading the table against a business of your own starts there: which rows you have, and which you do not. Where the sale is concluded away from the page, the payment and return rows are never opened, and the flow finishes with the product on display.
When the goods are bought unseen, the product page carries the description
Kokudankokuya’s product pages carry a written description of a scent no customer can smell before buying, and the purchase decision rests on that description. The Kokudankokuya shop sells perfume, and nothing a page can do will put a bottle in a reader’s hand. In a shop the product argued for itself: the box came off the shelf, it was tried, and the customer decided. The text online is not promotion around the sale; it occupies the place the product used to occupy.
Each question a customer asks in person has to find a field or a line on the page. A property nobody can see exists only as far as somebody wrote it down. Unanswered, the question goes to the seller instead, and a sale whose questions leave the page stops ending there. What belongs in the text is therefore already being said aloud at the counter.
A perfume bought as a gift is chosen by somebody who will never wear it, so the question in their head is about somebody else’s taste. Part of the shopping at Kokudankokuya is done for a gift, which puts the description under more strain. Which fields the page has to hold comes out of that, not out of the layout. Who the text addresses stops being a matter of style once it has to explain a product to a reader who will never try it.
What counts as a sellable unit is not the question here; describing a product is one job and pricing or stocking it is another. At Kokudankokuya fragrance family and the note of a scent sit beside the category tree as a way in of their own, and the article on which record price and stock hang from handles the data behind it. Where the description lives in the catalogue is settled separately from what it says.
The dividing line is the moment of decision, not the kind of goods. Where a buyer looks the goods over at handover and accepts them there, the product is still arguing for itself, and the page only has to bring somebody as far as that moment. Not every trade puts this weight on the page. The practical way in is to write down what people ask you face to face; how that description is then built into a shop is what our e-commerce development service covers.
When the buyer builds the product on screen, every choice changes the screen
Every choice changes the screen because the screen is looking something up rather than working it out. KGM SsangYong’s sales channel builds the car on screen from the visitor’s trim and colour choices, and shows the price and the image recorded for the combination.
The buyer now runs alone what used to be a conversation, and every answer that comes back was written down beforehand. At a counter it went: which trim, which colour, what that comes to. In KGM SsangYong’s own online sales channel each pairing of trim and colour has a line to itself, carrying the price, the picture and the sales terms.
On a screen the sequence runs the opposite way to a shop floor: the choice arrives before the object, and what is sold takes shape out of the pairing the buyer puts together. In a shop the options came attached to the goods, a box holding the volume it holds and a car wearing the colour it wears, so the buyer picked from what was already standing there.
Until the car is delivered, the pairing exists on the screen and in the catalogue line behind it. KGM SsangYong wanted that step to sit earlier than the visit to a dealer, so the car is assembled before it is ever seen and what the buyer approves is the pairing in front of them.
Where a choice leaves the price where it was, there is no pairing to assemble, and the option stays a piece of information or a way of browsing. Not every option works that way. Telling the cases apart is the business of the article on product variants; the outcome is what matters here. A pairing with no line in the catalogue cannot be assembled on the page at all, and the article on pre-sale steps a visitor can run alone weighs that preparation.
The right of withdrawal answers for goods bought unseen
The right exists for purchases whose first encounter with the goods happens at delivery rather than at the moment of deciding. Turkey’s regulation on distance contracts (Mesafeli Sözleşmeler Yönetmeliği) lets a consumer withdraw from a distance contract inside the period it sets, without stating a reason and without paying a penalty. A purchase is decided at one end of the sequence and the goods turn up at the other.
On the seller’s side that is structural rather than generous: a return belongs to the sale as it is built. The detail stays in the text of the regulation; what this section takes from it is that the right is there and where it comes from. The route back into the sale is therefore laid out from the start.
Reading the regulation against a catalogue of your own is how a business sees how the right looks in its own trade. The contracts the right leaves out are named in the regulation’s own text, and this article does not reproduce that list.
The return step is designed alongside the order flow rather than bolted on after it. The right itself follows from the contract having been concluded at a distance.
However closely a page describes a scent, the scent itself arrives with the parcel. The perfume in Kokudankokuya’s catalogue is bought without being smelled, and the buyer meets it with the box already in hand. For goods like that the distance between deciding and encountering is a matter of the senses.
Which texts and registrations a seller has to have in place before starting is a separate subject. On a screen the return runs on the order record, and because what was sold is written there, giving goods back stops being an exercise in remembering.
The order record keeps what the buyer saw on screen
The record keeps the sale as the buyer saw it: what was bought, and what the screen said about it at the time. That content is settled while the pages are still drawings. Screens can be redrawn; a field nobody wrote at the time cannot be filled in on orders already placed. Anything shown to a buyer and stored nowhere is beyond recall once the goods have gone out.
A shop sale used to leave a paper receipt in the buyer’s hand; an online sale leaves an order record, and that record keeps what the buyer was shown as well as what was sold. The difference follows from where the sale was concluded. A receipt carries a sum and a date; the record carries the pairing somebody approved as well.
Once an order is confirmed, nobody has to assemble the pairing again. What moves on to the next step is the record, not the picture that was on the screen. In the KGM SsangYong channel the pairing that sells travels into the order with the price and the sales terms it was recorded under.
What gets consulted when a question comes is a record rather than a recollection. A buyer who decided from a screen leaves a fixed place to compare what arrived against what was shown: what the pairing cost, which picture it carried and which terms it sold under are all written in the order. That is where the record earns its place, after the delivery. Steps taken after the order lean on the same writing; a person used to carry that information from one hand to the next.
Where the exchange is completed off the page, what gets kept is a request rather than an order, recording what was asked rather than what was sold. Not every site grows a record of this kind.
How a product is described on a page and what an order writes down get decided in the same conversation. The page and the record look at each other across that decision: the page fixes what a buyer is shown, the record fixes where the account of it is kept. Where those decisions are taken is set out on our e-commerce development page.
