B2B E-COMMERCE : NEW AFFICIENCIES AND RELATIONSHIPS
The trade between business firms (business-to-business commerce or B2B ) represents a huge marketplace. The total amount of B2B trade in United States in 2010 was about $16 trillion, with B2B e-commerce (online B2B) contributing about $3.3 trillion of that amount (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 ; authors, estimates). By 2016, B2B e-commerce should grow to about $4.4 trillion in the United States. The process of conducting trade among business firms in complex and requires significant human intervention, and therefore, it consumers significant resources . Some firms estimate that each corporate purchase order for support products costs them, on average, at least $100 in administrative overhead. Administrative overhead includes processing paper, approving purchase decisions, spending time using the telephone and fax machines to search for products and arrange for purchases, arranging for shipping , and receiving the goods. Across the economy, this adds up to trillions of dollars annually being spent for procurement processes that could potentially be automated. If even just a portion of inter-firm trade were automated and parts of the entire procurement process assisted by the Internet, literally trillions of dollars might be released for more productive uses, consumer prices potentially would fall, productivity would increase, and the economic wealth of the nation would expand . This is the promise of B2B e-commerce .The challenge of B2B e-commerce is changing existing patterns and systems of procurement, and designing and implementing new Internet-based B2B solutions.