E-Commerce Lecture 10

B2B Companies Seek To Handle Bills Online

The term "electronic bill payment" generally refers to a consumer service. Most moderately active Internet users either pay some of their bills online -- or they would like to when technology and security issues are resolved to their satisfaction. Click here to see the rest of the article.

At the peak of the business-to-business boom, which coincided with the dot-com glory days, there were more than 2,000 B2B exchanges, according to eMarketer senior analyst Steve Butler. However, most of those fledgling enterprises did not survive the subsequent bust.

Notes from The Lesson Plan

The learning objectives of lesson 3 include:

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.

It’s one thing for a consumer to order a book from Amazon but quite another to contract for a turbine engine over the
Web. Relationships between customers and suppliers and partners in B2B are much more complex, long term, often
contractual, and involve bigger dollars. The following table shows a few of the contrasts between B2B and B2C orders.

In our first reading, you kind of get the feel for B2B. It includes more than just businesses selling to each other, It involves some pretty sophisticated technologies such as XML. Make sure that you get a feel for this in your readings.

Where HTML describes how data will appear in a browser, whether in boldface, italics, or columns, XML, or extensible markup language, describes—as a bar code does—what kind of information is being displayed, like price, inventory number, and manufacturer.

Vendors like Commerce One are betting the bank that XML will revolutionalize e-business. “XML is a critical open standard that will simplify interbusiness communications, resulting in a rapid increase in the number of buyers and suppliers conducting commerce via the Internet over the next 10 years,” says Mark Hoffman, president and CEO of Commerce One. “Too much ‘people power’ is needed to prepare supplier content for conversion into a rich format that can be shared with multiple buying organizations. This is precisely where XML promises to change the game entirely.”

Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) was supposed to be a standard set of electronic documents that would be used for every business transaction, greatly reducing transaction time. But large companies customized the standard forms to their liking, and forced them on their suppliers, who were left with little choice but to buy a bevy of customized forms from vendors all too happy to step into this new market. The result: a standard that never really was.

XML may have a similar destiny. While groups like XLM.org exist to facilitate the creation of industry specific XML standards, companies unwilling to wait around for them are starting to build their own.

Companies like XMLSolutions of McLean, Va., produce and market robust translators that convert EDI documents to XML formats for quick distribution via the Internet, and then can reconvert them back to EDI documents when they return to the original source.

XMLSolutions has pioneered an "intelligent" XML translation process that puts highly descriptive information into previously compressed EDI translations, increasing the value and usability of rich corporate information.
"Almost everyone has a Web server, so it doesn't take much to utilize XML," notes Greg Saltzman, director of operations at Lightbridge, an application service provider in Burlington, Mass. "I find XML easier to implement and there is more knowledge about XML out in the marketplace. XML also enables greater flexibility. With XML the user is able to create specific fields for information."

Thus it is a small wonder that the XML Adoption Index demonstrates such speedy growth in XML use. And, according to IDC's Coburn, "Early adoption of XML, rapid as it has been, has been driven by many gee-whiz business opportunities that are paying off quickly. We are just seeing the tip of the XML iceberg. There are very great efficiencies that lie ahead."

In our second reading, the article describes the four phases or categories of e-commerce. Make sure that you are familiar with the four phases (Batch EDI, Basic E-Commerce, Community Commerce, and Collaborative Commerce) AND the four characteristics of these phases.

Your basic objective today is to become familiar with the overall idea of B2B. Work the vocabulary, read the articles. This should give you a good start. Tomorrow, we will work with various examples of these phases or categories AND examine the technology levels associated with B2B.