One company that comes to mind is the General Electric Company . When researching this company only last
week for an operations project I noticed that the company had made huge costs savings through B2B E.C.
This company has sold over 7 billion USD via the B2B EC in 2000 and conducted over 6billion USD in online auctions.
This brings me to my next discussion which is the types of B2B EC system that companies use.
According to Lucking � Reilly and Spulber (2000) B2B EC can be arranged in 4 different types of electronically
facilitated exchange systems. They are as follows:
- Brokers
- Auctioneers
- Dealers
- Exchanges
As B2B Ecommerce is becoming increasingly popular with many companies, the type of b2b ecommerce system
itself will have a huge impact on the openness of the b2b ecommerce. I didn�t realise how important the nature
of the system design was to companies and realised it has a huge impact on the diversification and competition
of there downstream activities.
