Act 2 for chemical e-commerce

Abstract

Count e-commerce in the chemical industry among the flops of the dot-com boom and bust. Not that the major chemical companies didn’t make a go of it, individually and in partnerships, in the early 2000s. But efforts to launch Amazon-like web catalogs for buying and selling chemicals petered out quickly; the companies that remained in business pivoted to developing online logistics tools and other services. It seemed that trade in chemicals—more involved than selling books and consumer items—was too complex an undertaking for the shiny new thing called a web portal. Nowadays, however, people buy Porsches online. Businesses are thoroughly acclimated to cloud computing, and web services have matured to the point at which once-complex transactions are routine. So chemical purveyors are trying again. In recent months, several web platforms have emerged for selling chemicals via online catalogs. This time, executives maintain, the chemical industry is ready to make e-commerce