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 consumer.

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.

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. 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.

Jack Ma (simplified Chinese: 马云; traditional Chinese: 馬雲; pinyin: Mǎ Yún; born September 10, 1964) is the founder, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, he is formally an English teacher at Hangzhou Teachers College.

Ma was born in the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. Ma attended Hangzhou Teachers College and graduated in 1988 with a bachelor's degree in English. Ma initially failed the entrance exam twice. While at the school, Ma was elected student chairman. He later became a lecturer in English and International Trade at the Hangzhou Dianzi University. Ma first started building websites for Chinese companies with the help of friends in the US. Ma has commented that "The day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house," and on a very slow dial-up connection, "we waited three and a half hours and got half a page.... We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved (to my house guests that) the Internet existed"^{[original research?]}