Information Technology is having a tremendous impact on today's workplace in creating new ways of doing business. The expanding capabilities of networks, the extensive use of the Internet, and the radical improvements in personal computers are all contributing to creating a foundation for conducting business electronically, and bringing us into the age of electronic commerce (E-Commerce or EC). The advent of Internet-based business-to-business electronic commerce (B2B-EC) has brought about many benefits to enterprises in developed countries. It offers direct links between trading firms and their customers, which creates a new trading mechanism in a highly effective and efficient manner, thus reducing operating costs and achieving quick response time. As such, enterprises in developing countries have begun to apply B2B-EC to their businesses, in order to achieve these benefits as well.
China has been developing dramatically these years, and has joined the WTO in 2001. However, B2B electronic markets are still in their early stages of development. Diverse aspects of consumer economy such as purchasing habits, payment methods and modes of exchange are different from those of the developed countries. These years, many corporate suppliers and customers in China are looking for Internet-based solutions to streamline their procurement procedures and to reduce the cost of establishing trading relationship by conducting trading transactions electronically (Martinsons, 2002).
Due to the China’s specific economy environment, the development of full-scale e-commerce processes in B2B markets may encounter several obstacles. According to Hempel and Kwong (2001), the network infrastructure is less of a bottleneck in China today, but the business infrastructure presents special problems, such as financial, logistic and legal infrastructures. In addition, trust and security are