Business-to-business e-commerce
refers to the commercial transactions that occur among business firms. Increasingly, these transactions are flowing through a variety of different Internet- enabled mechanisms. About 80 percent of online B2B e-commerce is still based on proprietary systems for electronic data interchange (EDI). Electronic data interchange enables the computer-to-computer exchange between two organizations of standard transactions such as invoices, bills of lading, shipment schedules, or purchase orders. Transactions are automatically transmitted from one information system to another through a network, eliminating the printing and handling of paper at one end the inputting of data at the other . Each major industry in the United States and much of the rest of the world has EDI standards that define the structure and information fields of electronic documents for that industry.
EDI originally automated the exchange of documents such as purchase order, invoices, and shipping notices. Although some companies still use EDI for document automation,