The Nuts and Bolts of Business-to-Business E-Commerce

By Brian Walsh With commercial interests fueling the rapid growth of the Internet, sooner or later your organization will have to jump on the electronic commerce bandwagon. Nine companies tell us how they succeeded in making the transition.
Electronic commerce has been at the epicenter of a mesh of trading partner relationships for more than 20 years. With e-commerce, electronic component manufacturers provide samples to their distributors. Photojournalists submit images to a stock house. Fast-food outlets combine their purchasing power. Health-care companies check eligibility and receive settlement. And the guy who sells stepladders to the giant home center uses e-comme rce because that's the only way the home center will buy anything.
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The question is not when we will arrive in a computer-mediated market but, rather, when will your organization enter that market and what competition will it find when it gets there? Deftly combining a long history with the latest technology, e-commerce is the most popular application of the moment. Presales, encryption, customer support--they're all part of the mystique of electronic commerce. But the real lure is undoubtedly the money.
We're all in it for the money. Commercial interests are the largest segment of the Internet and will continue to fuel its growth. Think of all those documents with little dollar signs on them that companies deal with on a daily basis. Now imagine them all as bits flowing automatically in and out of their respective databases--no paper, no phone calls, no faxes. That was the promise of EDI (electronic data interchange) (see "Everything Old Is New Again," page 82).
Now it's called electronic commerce. R on Koskinen, marketing director for AT&T's SecureBuy service, explains: "Business-to-business e-commerce takes many different forms. So, as such, you can consider EDI business-to-business e-commerce. You can consider some types of message-enabled applications to be facilitated for business-to-business e-commerce. You can also look at Web-based catalogs that provide features of functions that are necessary for businesses to sell to other businesses as business-to-business e-commerce."
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No matter how you slice it, your systems will have to exchange legal documents related to the transparent transfer of goods and services. The Internet provides ubiquitous, high-speed access to information. It offers a platform-independent means to exchange information with trading partners. Where EDI was primarily the exchange of documents between application subsystems, such as order entry or accounts payable, Internet-based e-commerce casts a wider net: Documents are exchan ged in real time; your customers or partners may be as likely to use their browsers to access your system as to use a local system; and transaction flow follows a matrix of user-to-application and application-to-application paths. EDI is faceless; no common user interface or mechanism addresses what the Web does so well: promotions links, editorial content, integration with internal systems and intensive personalization access. Customers can help themselves--and get fast responses to inquiries and access to complete information.