The emergence of new business software known as collaborative commerce (C-Commerce), is changing the way business partners work together.The first generation e-commerce and B2B solutions have failed to yield the desired business performance in terms of turnover and profit, mainly owing to the absence of integration among the key players in the supply chain.

In today's highly competitive web-based business scenario, manufacturers and all the players in the supply chain should be extra efficient while sharing information internally with partners, suppliers, and customers. In this context, several research studies have demonstrated that competitive advantage involves not only how well a company operates its own business, but also focuses on how well the company shares information and coordinates activities with other members of its extended enterprise (Welty& Becerra, 2001).

The rapid growth of the internet as a global medium for communication has heightened global competition and consumer awareness, and the direct fallout of this is that customers are armed with more information on the various dimensions of trade than ever before. Technological advances, increased competitiveness, and availability of a wide variety of suppliers have enabled customers to switch from one supplier to another in an easy way, not only in search of capital goods and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), but also for buying modern financial products and services (Di & Power, 1983). Yet another direct outcome of this net-based business scenario is that innovations and technological advancements have shortened the product life cycles, thus compelling the producers and dealers to market their products without any further delay (Mike, 2001).

In the early 1990s, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was in the forefront. As World Wide Web (WWW) and internet technologies reached a matured stage, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), e-procurement and Supply Chain Management (SCM) came in as back-end tools. Currently, the focus is on collaborative commerce(c-commerce), where all of these applications are united into one single system, to carry out web-based trading in a much more reliable and efficient way (Bechek & Brea, 2001). It is also observed that collaborative commerce allows for multichannel commerce enabling enterprises to deliver greater value to customers by synchronizing events and activities among business partners (Goldratt, 2000).

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