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Top1. Introduction
Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is one of the fastest growing applications for the Internet, which represents the sales aspect of electronic business (e-business) (Schneider, 2010; Turban, 2010). E-commerce is about performing transactions on the Web, such as purchasing and selling products, procurement, supply chain management, and training. While these fields have evolved somewhat independently over the past few decades, they have a lot to contribute to each other, i.e., collaborate. Organizations have realized that effective collaboration is a key to knowledge management and good knowledge management practices are essential for a successful organization; therefore, in recent years, many organizations are willing to go beyond private e-commerce and work collaboratively with other organizations. In other words, carry-out transactions, as well as share and collaborate on activities and projects using the Web to go beyond organizational boundaries, while remain autonomous (Khosrowpour, 2004). This new form of collaboration is known as collaborative commerce (c-commerce) (Chen, Zhang, Zhou, 2007; Huang & Fan, 2007; Nerve Wire, 2002).
C-commerce enables organizations to share information, and at the same time should provide all means to protect their privacy as well as all sensitive information. Furthermore, organizations usually build their resource management systems (RMSs) independently; therefore, it is highly expected to have disparate heterogeneous RMSs. Organizations usually run their RMSs on local area networks (LANs), which are accessed and interconnected through the Internet using wide area network (WAN) protocols and infrastructure (FitzGerald & Dennis, 2011). Consequently, it is necessary to work on integrating these local systems to form applications that able to collaborate effectively.
While developing c-commerce applications, many challenges must be addressed to meet users, organizations, and applications satisfactions and maintain satisfactory quality-of-service (QoS); such as: high access bandwidth, low-cost bit-rate, high network and link reliability, high efficiency, availability, scalability, security, etc. Adding to the above challenges are the high cost of the installation and operation of local RMSs. Also, all local resources need to be continuously maintained and updated (Li & Xia, 2011; Issa et al., 2010).
Cloud computing is defined as the delivery of computing resources (hardware and software) as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network, typically the Internet (Sasikala, 2011). Cloud computing providers deliver applications through the Internet, which are accessed from Web browsers running on desktop and mobile applications, while the business applications and data are stored on remote servers (Peiris et al., 2011; Wu & Duan, 2006). It is very interesting to perceive how c-commerce can benefit from this tremendous cloud computing technological development and relax the above challenges (Li & Xia, 2011).