Adopters and non-adopters of business-to-business electronic commerce in Singapore

Although there has been an increase in research studies of business-to-business (B2B) electronic commence (e-commerce), most studies were carried out in the United States or Europe. There are very limited studies on B2B e-commerce in the Asian context. Our effort examined Web-based B2B e-commerce initiatives in Singapore, an island of 650 km2 in South–East Asia. Data were collected from 108 firms using a mail survey, which showed that 52.8% firms have adopted B2B e-commerce; of these, two-third had a formal plan and/or task force for B2B e-commerce deployment. Customer-related applications were generally more common than supplier-related applications. Problems in B2B e-commerce adoption included the difficulty of measuring benefits, fear of granting suppliers and customers access to corporate systems and insufficient time for staff to develop new skills in e-commerce. Implications of the results are discussed.