1 INTRODUCTION Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to make vast amounts of information available to users located in various parts of the world and to facilitate rapid communication between them. One application of these technologies is in the development of ‘e-commerce’ to support electronic trading. E-commerce can be defined as any form of economic activity conducted over computer-mediated networks. The potential of e-commerce caught public’s attention as a result of ventures such as the electronic bookshop, Amazon.com, and the growing number of other Internet-based retailers in the business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce area. However, business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce is growing much more quickly than B2C forms of electronic trading. This study is part of a larger project that is investigating the impact of B2B e-commerce on access to global markets for developing country producers in South Africa, Bangladesh and Kenya.1 The main aim of project is to build up an empirical basis for examining whether B2B e-commerce enables firms in developing countries to overcome the problems they face in trading on the international market. There have been many claims that B2B e-commerce offers a radically new means of enabling producers and buyers to trade with each other regardless of where they are located geographically (Panagariya 2000; United Nations 2000; Xie 2000). B2B e-commerce is being promoted as a means of enabling producers in developing countries to become more integrated within the global economy on economic terms that are favourable for them. Reductions in transaction costs accompanying B2B e-commerce implementations often using the public Internet are expected to facilitate more efficient international trade. The new Internet-based trading platforms are expected to make it easier for producer firms to find buyers for their products and to complete their sales (Benjamin and Wigand 1995; Leebaert 1998; Malone and Laubacher 1998; Malone et al. 1987). There is also an expectation that producer firms based in developing countries will develop direct one-to-one trading relationships with their upstream and downstream trading partners, bypassing traditional intermediaries and potentially enabling them to relocate within traditional sector value chains. The principal barrier to achieving the potential benefits of B2B e-commerce is often regarded as insufficient investment in the telecommunication infrastructure and the high costs of connectivity when a network is available. 1 The larger study, E-Commerce for Developing Countries: Building an Evidence Base for Impact Assessment’ is funded by the Department for International Development in the UK as part of the Globalisation and Poverty Programme and is led by the London School of Economics and Political Science (Media@lse) and the Institute of Development Studies, at the University of Sussex. The homepage of the E-commerce project is http://www.gapresearch.org/production/ecommercemore.html . 1