The Dragon and the Shopping Cart

A number of years ago I spent two weeks teaching the basics of E-Commerce to some students from Guangzhou province in southern China.
The class itself was quite high level, and designed to teach the rudiments of X12-based EDI, but also cover the concept of back-end integrations with order management, inventory, and financial systems and the way the data messages themselves were created and transmitted between the parties involved.
Although the students' command of English was only fair, it was far better than my Mandarin, which is non-existent and they seemed to understand my words reasonably well.
After the first few days into the class though, I could tell they were struggling to understand and we had to take an unscheduled diversion from the lesson plan to sort things out.
I learned that it wasn't language difficulties causing confusion, but rather some of the basic business concepts. These students were only familiar with 'cash and carry' business transactions and such familiar concepts (to us) as sending a Purchase Order to a supplier, then having that supplier ship the goods and submit an Invoice was a novel idea. I never did get them to understand the concept of specific terms of sale such as '2-10 Net 15'.
We didn't dwell on some these for long in order to get back on track. I just made sure they understood the basics of the most simple supply chain transactions, but this was a real eye-opener for me. Nevertheless, one need now only look at what thousands of small Chinese manufacturing firms are currently doing with ecommerce to see that in spite of coming from way behind, the Chinese have fully grasped E-business and the current generation's business leaders have learned their lessons well.