Introduction to the Special Section: Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce

Innovative technologies are changing the landscape of interorganizational relationships. Following proprietary interorganizational information systems (IOS), the advent of Internet-based electronic commerce provided new opportunities and challenges to connect businesses, facilitate transactions, and enable collaborations among business partners, sellers and buyers, and businesses and public institutions. Recent advances in wireless and peer-to-peer technologies can be applied in interorganizational environments. After initially focusing on the use of Internet technologies to facilitate and automate business transactions, researchers and practitioners have begun to include more complex, collaborative business processes in their analyses. The Special Section of the International Journal of Electronic Commerce highlights some ongoing developments in business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce research. As an introduction to the Special Section, this article provides an overview of the topic area, reviews earlier research, and points out several research issues.