You make a product purchase from a cyberspace business based on the other side of the world, but the shipment arrives flawed -- what would you do? More importantly, what could you do?
The arrival of a new business to business (B2B) Web site -- com2B.com -- begs two questions about companies sourcing from factories over the Net. How can a Web site ensure the quality of products a customer receives and what legal recourse is available should there be a problem?
"The one thing about B2B is that if you add in the anonymity element of the Internet email customer, then ... they may not think twice about [ripping you off]," said Chris Zagers, operations manager at Pro QC Systems, a Taipei quality-control company.
Setting up quality control systems in the real world is hard enough, he explained. Putting one online would be even more difficult.
He pointed to the international quality control standard -- ISO 9000 -- as an example. According to Zagers, ISO certification is no guarantee of quality -- and finding quality standards that fit online B2B sites is even much more difficult.
"The science and technology is already out there, it's just that somebody needs to apply it," Zagers said.
But even if a company found ways to check quality, what recourse might it have if a contract were violated?
According to Squire Sanders & Dempsey lawyer Nicholas Chen (
Any transaction made online might not be subject to existing laws as the rules of cyber business have not yet been written. Currently, countries around the world are scrambling to pass legislation to cover the new Internet economy.
Chen explained that in the early days of the Web some people took Internet names like Cocacola.com, even though Coca cola is a registered trademark of the company. US judges ruled this did not violate trademark laws. A new law had to be implemented to take company names from these "cyber squatters," but that law was not in place beforehand.
According to Chen, a judge presiding over a cyber-case might ask the rhetorical question,"Hey, is cyberspace in my domain, is it in my jurisdiction?"
When asked about quality control and other issues associated with sourcing products from an Internet B2B site, Commerce One CEO Mark Hoffman admitted these were some of the problems of developing such sites.
He said com2B.com, the Taiwan division of a worldwide trading site his company has helped set up, would have to develop quality control mechanisms.
And Commerce One -- regarded as a world leader in B2B site development -- has developed e-supply chain business Web sites for a number of large US companies, including General Motors.
Hoffman said the new Taiwan B2B site will have to develop quality control measures through customer feedback. The future of business is online, according to Hoffman, as the benefits of online trading are hard to ignore. Traditional companies have found tremendous savings by hooking their existing suppliers into networks that can better communicate and work with the mother ship.
US-based Forrester Research estimates that B2B volume will grow from NT$115.3 billion in 2000 to NT$4.9 trillion in 2004 in Taiwan alone.
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