What is business-to-business e-commerce?
It’s companies buying from and selling to each other online. But there’s more to it than purchasing. It’s evolved to encompass supply chain management as more companies outsource parts of their supply chain to their trading partners. I use electronic data interchange. Am I already doing it? Yes. And if you’re getting value from your EDI investments, there’s no reason to abandon them now. But it’s a good idea to think about whether any other data exchange methods have a role in your future B2B efforts. EDI has limitations, including an inflexible format that makes it difficult to use for any but the most straightforward transactions. Many small companies never adopted it because it was expensive. Much of the newer e-commerce software uses XML — grammatical rules for describing data on the Web — as its standard for data exchange. Though the software may also handle EDI transactions, XML allows for more variety in the information companies exchange and was designed for open networks. Pred
