Trust Based Buyer-Supplier Relationship Will Further Assist Boots.com's Business Development Strategy for Product Line Extension

In the last twenty years the research on inter-organizational relationship has been growing, it circles around the idea that intensive competition in the marketplace is making it too expensive for one firm to do everything on its own. The widespread belief that companies should focus on their core competencies (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990) has led to an outsourcing trend and in increasing awareness of the importance of a competitive supply base. There is a strong belief and a general agreement that company require a variety of relationships, while there is not a 'best' type of relationship exist. However, trust in exchange relationship has been hypothesized to be a valuable economic asset because it has been described as an important antecedent to effective inter-organizational collaboration (Sako, 1991; Smith, Carroll and Ashford, 1995) The aim of this paper is to examine the importance of building a good buyer-supplier relationship for Boots.com's product line extension business growth strategy. Thus examine the validity of the research topic: 'Trust based buyer-supplier relationship will further assist Boots.com's business development strategy for product line extension'