Business value of B2B electronic commerce: The critical role of inter-firm collaboration

B2B (business-to-business) electronic commerce provides firms with different business value depending on how organizations use the online network. In this paper, we distinguish two different types of B2B e-commerce adoption: basic and collaborative B2B e-commerce. With "basic B2B e-commerce", firms implement the electronic network simply to automate the exchange of commercial documents. In contrast, B2B networks are used to create new inter-firm operations with channel partners in "collaborative B2B e-commerce." The central claim of this paper is that firms are unlikely to achieve significant benefits with Basic B2B e-commerce. B2B electronic networks offer dramatic performance improvement only when the B2B network is used to create new collaboration with channel partners. Based on the survey conducted in the grocery industry, this study suggests that the real source of performance improvement in the B2B electronic commerce is not an electronic linkage itself, but the collaboration enabled by the electronic network.