This article studies certain standards which have been developed for exchanging information about business and trading transactions, both nationally and internationally. In this context standards means standardised ways of representing trade information and standardised procedures for communicating it in computer-based environments. Early in the 1960s, the United Nations UN/ECE working party was formed. The purpose of the this organization was to simplify and standardize trade document. This organization eventually evolved into what is currently known as EDIFACT, the international EDI standards organization. EDIFACT is the basis for agreement on a common structure for documents such as those used for trading(e.g., orders, invoices), so that they can be interchanged electronically between computer systems. The standard was ratified in 1987 and has already been adopted by many EDI users for the earlier European and American standards for trading data interchange called UN/TDl and ANSI Xl2 respectively.