Business to business electronic commerce at works!

The Internet brings many changes to our business relationships but the current euphoria about e-commerce and virtual enterprises has a tendency to bury the long experience we actually have in these areas under a lot of hype. Business to business relationships on an electronic basis have a long and successful history if we include intracompany and fax-based business activities. Similarly mail order houses for years have worked with fax and data-network based transactions in business to consumer relationships. Amazon.com in this respect is just a latecomer and a non-profitable one in addition. With the coming of the Internet and the WWW an explosion in public awareness and as a consequence in business to consumer relationships is taking place. The much more important field of business to business relationships (sometimes hyped as virtual enterprises) has seen a much slower development, especially if we include small and medium sized companies. The vast majority of those is very hesitant to move essential parts of their business processes to the Internet. The paper analyzes and discusses some of the reasons for this behavior.