The Naked Supplier
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, in cyberspace everyone is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma behind a firewall. Knowing for sure that the customer or supplier you're dealing with is in fact who he or she claims to be has never been more...
[From iSource Business, May 2001] On the Internet, (as we know from the now-famous The New Yorker cartoon), no one can tell if you're a person or a dog. Nor, for that matter, can they tell whether you are a legitimate corporate customer or supplier, which makes e-commerce a risky proposition. But a few solution providers are working to take the risk out of online B2B transactions by providing tools to verify the identity of potential e-business partners.
Trust No One
Risk has been a component of every business transaction since trading began, and wise businesspeople have typically assessed their risk before consummating any deal. Since this type of risk assessment slows down business, merchants have relied on relationships with their partners as one way to mitigate the hazards of commerce. Before the digital age, the face-to-face, the eye contact and the handshake kept business personal and fostered a sense of trust. But now, e-procurement and the Internet have influenced that dynamic.
Of course, trust was not an issue in the early days of e-procurement, back when e-commerce meant using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to connect to your existing supply base. Companies were generally just hardwiring links to partners they had known and traded with for years. After all, EDI was such an expensive, complex process that it made sense only when the relationship and trust was already established.
Nor was trust a key issue when the e-marketplaces first made their debut in the late 1990s. Many
