E-services in business to business (B2B) context

With more and more intensive competitive environment, it is not enough for business companies only to develop high-quality products and/or market them at competitive prices. To better meet increasingly sophisticated individual buyers' requirements, business companies may have to improve their objectives in terms of cost, quality, flexibility and dependability simultaneously. To enable this, business companies begin to look to e-services as one way for gaining/sustaining competitive advantages. E-services cover not only the product services in itself, but also the business process services, which might not be clearly defined by the contract. This in turn brings a big challenge to business companies in identifying what are satisfactory e-services and how to offer them along the business process. This paper proposes that the e-services quality offered by business suppliers is influenced by several sections: process factors, technical factors, organisation factors, industrial factors and cultural factors. We focus on the process factors in relation to the customers' expected services and investigate the key service dimensions. The primary objective of this paper is to serve as a basis for our future research on developing a framework for measuring the service quality in B2B e-commerce environments.