Collaborative B2B e-commerce or c-commerce as it is more popularly known refers to the process of companies sharing their intellectual capital as well as their core competencies using the Internet and B2B exchanges.
Businesses are linked to their partners using extensive, complicated and expensive infrastructure that enables them to interact with each other, sharing data and working together to in a reliable and secure B2B exchange.
B2B exchanges can be public or private; businesses prefer private exchanges, as they are considered more secure, reliable and where they can control the infrastructure.
Public exchanges are relatively cheaper; offer the chance of recruiting new customers but these exchanges have not been very successful.
When businesses collaborate and participate in B2B e-commerce, they save time and labor, reduce inventories, can easily find new customers and work with them in a common platform, have excellent control over their supply chain integration and get a competitive edge.
Transactions are more transparent and business processes are more streamlined.
With efficient B2B integration, B2B partners can collaborate more effectively helping growth and boosting sales.
Collaborative B2B e-commerce requires the exchange of data and business processes between multiple business partners such as suppliers, traders, buyers and distributors necessitating a large complex infrastructure that may cost between $30,000 to a few million dollars! Certain basic factors influence successful collaborative B2B e-commerce such as being able to share resources to cooperate better, having state of art automated systems to ensure an error free environment ensuring users access to data by checking if they are authorized to access that data without wasting much time.
Businesses should have well defined corporate policies regarding compliance to all the rules and regulations that govern the exchange of information as well as procedures to ensure their implementation.
Delegate authority to decide on the level of access to data any employee can get and opt for systems that maintain user logs and audit trails for security purposes.
It is better to have experienced personnel to help implement the plans.
Challenges Faced By Businesses Opting To Use Collaborative B2b E-Commerce: Collaborative B2B e-commerce is still untested territory for many businesses as they are daunted by the numerous challenges it faces.
1.
Investing in the infrastructure needed to integrate internal, as well as external processes can be a very costly venture few companies are able to afford.
2.
Getting business partners to agree to use collaborative B2B e-commerce can be another challenge.
3.
Security of data shared is another aspect to be considered.
4.
The more the number of business partners, the harder it is to get to design an infrastructure that can deal with the different needs of the different partners of the collaboration.
There are firms that offer services as well as products that help run businesses successfully.